Archives for December 2013

David Crown and the Choir of Somerville College, Oxford, perform Victoria’s “O magnum mysterium”:

Take away love, and our earth is a tomb.
Robert Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi”

Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” This was Armstrong’s last commercial recording. He made it at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971, five months before his death:

To learn more about the history of this recording, go here.

“Whoso loves believes the impossible.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

• W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson

• David Cairns, Berlioz

• Otis Ferguson, The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson

• Moss Hart, Act One

• John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

• Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

• Fairfield Porter, Art in Its Own Terms

• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

• Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief

In honor of the season, here’s everybody’s favorite speech from Satchmo at the Waldorf. It’s based on something that actually happened to Louis Armstrong.
* * *
ARMSTRONG First time I laid eyes on Lucille, I says, “That’s for me.” Now she got them hoity-toity ways, put that cute little nose in the air. (In falsetto) “Louis, this the way it gonna be!” (As before) And that’s when I gotta take her down a peg. (Blustering) “Woman, don’t you be giving me no shit now!” (As before) Mostly, though, we get along real good. I guess most ladies would have quit my ass long ago, but Lucille, she digs me. Don’t bother me till I’m ready to bother. Use to call me on the road ‘fore she fly out to see me, just to make sure I ain’t got no chick in the sack. How ’bout that?
Tell you a story. We get married, Lucille goes out on the road with me and it’s Christmas. Come back to the hotel after the show and there’s a little tree right there in the room, all lit up like nothing you ever seen before. She done trimmed it and put on the lights for old Pops! Now I ain’t never had no Christmas tree before. We couldn’t afford nothing like that back in New Orleans. Then I go out in the world, hit the road, nobody ever thought to put up no tree for me in no hotel room–not until Lucille. I come in, see that tree in the corner, and she say, “Merry Christmas, Louis!” And you know what? I wouldn’t let her turn it off. Lay in bed all night looking at them pretty lights winking and blinking, and I say to myself, “Satch, you done lucked out. Better do what you gotta do to hang onto that gal. You ain’t gonna do no better long as you live.”

Judy Garland and Mel Tormé perform “The Christmas Song” on The Judy Garland Show in 1963:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“He that lives in hope dances without music.”
George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs