Great Songs from Great Britain

I've recently been listening again, for the first time in a while, to a favorite Sinatra album, Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain. It is, like many of his Reprise recordings, a mixed bag in terms of quality. But, like much of his Reprise catalog, when it is good, it is so very, very good.

One of the things I love about Great Songs from Great Britain is its relative obscurity. Recorded in London during the summer of 1962, it was initially released the same year only in Great Britain. It was finally released stateside in 1990 on compact disc. I couldn't have gotten my copy (complete with German import sticker on it) back in 1998 if it weren't for the Internet. I seriously doubt the album or compact disc has ever sat in any of the local music stores (many of which have since closed), but obviously I could be mistaken.

Supposedly, Sinatra would not allow its release in America because he was unhappy with the quality of his voice. From the CD liner notes, written by James Isaacs:

Great Songs from Great Britain never reached the colonies -- until now. It is the only collection that Sinatra in his then-dual roles of CEO of Reprise Records and his label's meal ticket, scrubbed for domestic release while clearing it for foreign markets.

A unapologetic perfectionist, the singer felt that his voice, after a recently concluded seven-week, 30-city world tour, was in less than peak form.

Recording with arranger/conductor Robert Farnon
And further illumination from my personal Sinatra bible, Will Friedwald's Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art:

...the unending pastoral richness of Robert Farnon's orchestral backgrounds contrasts sharply with the startling thinness of Sinatra's voice. What's worse, both arranger Farnon and singer Sinatra has no forewarning that they should be planning the album for a vocal artist proceeding at half-steam, and the extremly slow tempos of these romantic ballads leave Sinatra with no place to hide.

So, how bad was the voice of The Voice? On the best songs, a person unaware of the background would probably have no idea the singer and voice were exhausted. I'll let you be the judge.

The album's opening track, "The Very Thought of You," is vintage Sinatra. This ranks up there with much of what he recorded during his classic Capitol Records era (no doubt why this beautiful song and performance was selected to be the first on side one):

One of my overall favorite Sinatra recordings would have to be "If I Had You," a song he'd recorded twice before, in 1947 on The Voice of Frank Sinatra and 1957's A Swingin' Affair!. One of the standout qualities about this track happened by accident. According to Sinatra's pianist, Bill Miller, about the piano he was supposed to be playing: "someone forgot to tune the goddamn thing, which was unheard of." It occurred to Sinatra to ask if a celesta might be handy. It's hard to imagine this without it:

Perhaps my favorite song on this particular album, "The Gypsy," was a #1 hit for The Ink Spots back in 1946. But as good as their version may have been, only Sinatra could make the listener believe it was actually about him (and he was singing it to you and only you!):

Two of the other "better" songs from Great Songs from Great Britain, "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" and "A Garden in the Rain," the only song I've included in this post where one might get a sense of the supposed "thinness" of Sinatra's voice during the three day recording session:



Sinatra and Farnon

Rebirth of The Pines

Constructed in 1925, this is the way it was in July 2006.


Looking down First Street, January 2007
And then suddenly, one morning in April 2007, Lufkin awoke to find it in this condition:

No one is really sure what happened, but it was theorized an 18-wheeler or delivery truck somehow crashed in to it. It is in this state it sat for a while.

By May 2008, I'd pretty much given up on it ever being repaired.

I'd expected it to continue going down, but I was stunned to see it like this a year later, April 2009:

I had heard rumors that a restoration was under way, but this looked like more of a dismantling, which it was. But instead of destroying, the removed neon and giant green glass, inlaid fleur-de-lis, it was all being refurbished:


Wow!!

What's old is new again. In fact, it's downright shiny.


Way to go Lufkin! Bravo. You restore some faith in mankind.

The Face...

Here is an article a friend and I did for our high school newspaper back in October 1984. It was about a "legendary" marking on an UTMB (University of Texas Medical Branch) building in Galveston, called "the Face." There are various stories and explanations as to its origin and who is supposedly depicted - disgruntled former UTMB patient, the owner of the property on which the building is now located, for example - but it just as easily could have been our theory...

Click on it to make it bigger (that's what she said)

Early morning: Richmond/Rosenberg

I drove home from visiting family in Eagle Lake this past weekend via Richmond/Rosenberg. As is sometimes the case, I was rewarded by finding a couple of things I'd never photographed before, and a couple of things I got in a new light.

I'd snapped this great Herradura Restaurant neon sign before, but I just had to pull over as I entered Rosenberg to get it against the morning sky.


I couldn't leave Rosenberg without getting some pics of the old "colored" theater, the beautiful, Art Deco Cole Theater. Built in 1937, I'd taken some of it previously. A current musical obsession, The Ink Spots, performed here in 1948.



Fort Bend County Courthouse, c. 1909, Classical Revival/Beaux-Arts
Upon leaving Richmond, I did a double take as I drove past Larry's Original Mexican Restaurant. This type of thing fills me with so much joy I want to cry:



Jackpot!
About eight miles east of Richmond is the town of Sugar Land, best known locally (at least at one time) for the Imperial Sugar factory:

In 1907, the factory was purchased by Galvestonian (my hometown) I.H. Kempner, the great-grandfather (possibly great, great-grandfather) of a childhood friend. To further toot my own horn (toot, toot!), I briefly dated another grandchild, she being a cousin to the childhood friend.

R.I.P. Richard Gladwell

It saddened me to hear this past Sunday of the recent passing of Richard Gladwell. Gladwell was the host of a program played on NPR stations called With Heart and Voice. With Heart and Voice was "a weekly program of choral and organ music." I say "was," because I assume the show will be no more. I was encouraged required forced to go to Sunday school and attend church services until I graduated from high school. Consequently, I haven't been a regular church goer ever since. The closest I've come to being one again has been listening to With Heart and Voice every Sunday on my NPR station during my long, morning run (which I do, ironically, religiously). It has always reminded me of the great old Hook & Hastings pipe organ echoing throughout the church of my youth. Adieu, Richard Gladwell.

"Trumpet Tune in D," by David Johnson (the theme to With Heart and Voice):

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

According to the Wikipedia entry, the following images are in the public domain.

Having just finished David McCullough's book about Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, I now find myself sort of crushing on Alice Roosevelt (so look out, Blake Lively). Weird.

The Roosevelt clan in 1903, with Quentin on the left, TR, Ted, Jr., "Archie," Alice, Kermit, Edith, and Ethel.

Alice in 1891
Alice was Theodore Roosevelt's first child, born in 1884, and only offspring with his first wife. She (TR's first wife) would die as a result of Bright's disease, in addition to childbirth complications. It also happened to be the same day (in the same house, on a different floor) TR's mother, Mittie, passed away. In his diary, TR would say about that day: "The light has gone out of my life." He would never speak of his first wife ever again, failing to so much as mention her name in his autobiography.

Alice would be sent away, to live with TR's older sister, Bamie, until he eventually remarried in 1886. And I got the impression from reading Mornings on Horseback, as well as Alice's premature (she wrote it in 1935, and would live until 1980) autobiography, Crowded Hours, and Mrs. L: Conversations With Alice Roosevelt Longworth, that although he loved her, Alice was for TR an unfortunate reminder of a profoundly painful life event. Consequently, the way I read it, he didn't show her much affection, and being as busy as he was, he most likely didn't give her as much attention as she craved. Consequently, Alice could be a bit of handful. This blurb from from the children's book, What to Do about Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!, is probably only slightly hyperbolic:

Theodore Roosevelt had a small problem. Her name was Alice. Alice Lee Roosevelt was hungry to go places, meet people, do things. Father called it running riot. Alice called it eating up the world. Whether she was entertaining important White House visitors with her pet snake or traveling the globe, Alice bucked convention and turned every new experience into an adventure!

With her dog, Leo, in a 1902 White House photo
And according to Wikipedia:

When her father took office following the assassination of President William McKinley (an event that "filled (me) with an extreme rapture"), Alice became an instant celebrity and fashion icon. She was known as a rule-breaker in an era when women were under great pressure to conform. The American public noticed many of her exploits. She smoked cigarettes in public, rode in cars with men, stayed out late partying, kept a pet snake named Emily Spinach (Emily as in her spinster aunt and Spinach for its green color) in the White House, and was seen placing bets with a bookie.

Once, a White House visitor commented on Alice's frequent interruptions to the Oval Office, often because of her political advice. The exhausted President commented to his friend, author Owen Wister, after the third interruption to their conversation and after threatening to throw Alice 'out the window', "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both."

Alice (looking a bit more like her cousin, Eleanor) christening the sub named after her father, the USS Theodore Roosevelt in 1959

At the end of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency in 1909, she is alleged to have buried a voodoo doll of new First Lady Nellie Taft in the White House lawn. She was such a fixture of the Washington D.C. social circuit, living until 95-years-old, she was sometimes referred to "the other Washington Monument."

1902
1902
Picture from a 1906 postcard related to her wedding
Formal portrait from 1901
Someone was inspired all these decades later to do a YouTube video about her, complete with poetry by Lord Byron:

Victorian morning

This past Saturday, I took advantage of the first sunny day we've had here in well over a week to get some shots of two favorite Diedrich Rulfs masterpieces, the M.E. Rudisill House (1896) and the Roland Jones House (1895). Specifically, the morning sunlight really brought out the Queen Anne/Victorian detailing:

With busy North Street being just to the left in this picture, it was almost as if the 21st and 19th centuries were separated by merely the front yard of the Rudisill House.

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Nacogdoches' chief competitor of the magnificent Victorian homes of Galveston's leading architect, Nicholas Clayton, the Roland Jones House: