Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Behind frosted glass doors in a ramshackle former Masonic lodge building in Nashville, Tenn., sit the song peddlers. Their product, proclaimed in gilt letters on the door, is variously billed as "Wonder Music" or "Surefire Music" or "Tenn-Tex Music," but in the industry it is known simply as C. & W. Country and Western. Last week, to the planeloads of disk jockeys descending on Nashville for the ninth annual National Country Music Festival, C. & W. seemed surefire indeed. Its demise has often seemed near, but it is now going stronger than ever, and Nashville has even nosed out Hollywood...
...past year was written and recorded in Nashville, e.g., He'll Have to Go, Stuck On You, Cathy's Clown, Please Help Me, I'm Falling. The last, say the experts, is the "countriest" of all, a distinction that suggests the difficulty these days of distinguishing a true "country" song from a straight pop number. The basic C. & W. ingredients have always been a tune with folkish overtones, lyrics of Pleistocene simplicity, and a theme preferably proclaiming undying devotion to a faithless loved one. But country music is now wearing city clothes: the traditional fiddle and guitar accompaniment is being...
...Brooks recalls it, Lerner played a record of Ghost Riders in the Sky for Fritz over and over again, then Loewe sent one more ghost into the air and a far better one by writing his superb They Call the Wind Maria. "I never try to write a hit song." he says. "If you do, it is always silly, or Irving Berlin...
...town (before Camelot reaches New York, its railway fares and freight charges alone will reach $35,000), a playwright sometimes tosses everything but his last will and testament into the first draft to see what will go. A merchandising mentality ("Give them what they want") can sacrifice a song, a scene or a whole play to the whim of a weary tryout audience. But in experienced, honest hands, the road ordeal can also lead to the kind of relentless self-criticism in which Lerner, Loewe & Co. were caught up last week...
Irma La Douce. A French musical as fetching and airy as a bouffant petticoat stars Elizabeth Seal, whose song-and-dance skill and saucy insouciance flesh out her personable part as everybody's dream tart...