W. C. Handy:  Yellow Dog Blues

W. C. Handy: Yellow Dog Blues

W.C. Handy’s great “Yellow Dog Blues” incorporates an idea he picked up in the Mississippi Delta during his residencies in Clarksdale, Mississippi (1903-1905) then Memphis, his home base for endless gigs up through 1917. “Yellow Dog” was...
Hoagy Carmichael & Johnny Mercer:  Skylark

Hoagy Carmichael & Johnny Mercer: Skylark

I know of two perfect songs: Fauré’s “En sourdine,” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark.” Paul Verlaine was the poet for the first of them, and Johnny Mercer the lyricist for the second. Please don’t ask me to explain what makes them perfect, or even why I think they...