If you enjoy Steyn's Song of the Week at SteynOnline, please note that there'll be a live stage edition during the 2025 Mark Steyn Cruise - along with many other favorite features from SteynOnline and The Mark Steyn Show.
~For those who missed today's Serenade Radio edition of our Song of the Week, here's a chance to catch up. Today's episode tells the story of one of the greatest numbers of all. Written in 1936, it was just another song for its first decade and, even as its reputation grew over half--a-century, there was no definitive version. But, when almost all the other standards have fallen by the wayside, this one will endure.
Click above to listen.
~Thank you for your kind responses to this series. Of last week's presentation of "Unforgettable", Nancy Joy says simply:
Great episode today!!
Christine Page, Mark's fellow northern New Englander and member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
The late Natalie Cole was an absolutely superb singer, particularly of jazz and classics from the Great American Songbook. She may not have inherited her dad's inimitable, smoky voice, but he did pass along to her a whole ton of talent. She could take just about any kind of song — from sassy and swingin' to silky and sentimental — and knock it clean out of the park. There were other sides to her as well; my Christmas season is never complete until I've listened to her lovely rendition of 'The Holly and the Ivy'.
I guess you can tell I'm a fan. Thank you Nat, and R.I.P. Natalie.
For Alison Castellina, an English Steyn Clubber, the show evoked maternal memories:
This was probably my mother's favourite song from The American Songbook. Born in 1930, she was 21 in 1951 and had just met my father then, so I heard her singing and playing it from my earliest years. It is so simple, almost chromatic but strangely emotional with a 'crunch' in the chords. It is the opposite of a song about unrequited love. Cearly it is about the regard being returned in equal measure with truth in the lyrics. It is an amazing accomplishment for one person, I feel, to write both the music and lyrics. I wonder who the unforgettable lady was?
As for Cole's daughter combining with her dead father, I am not keen. Making the dead say or sing things they may ahve refused to do in life, is not ideal. I foresee the future with AI doing a lot of this and law suits fighting over the earnings all over the place. Technology can now take anyone's voice and make them say anything, in foreign languages tpp. Isn't it 'soul stealing'? Patent your attributes while you are still alive?
One more - from Gary Alexander, a West Coast member of The Mark Steyn Club and our resident music maven:
Another great show. In my Valentine's Day radio special each year, I celebrate a couple of 'near miss' songsmith birthdays of Harold Arlen and Walter Donaldson (born on February 15), but Irving Gordon is the only songwriter who hit that Big Heart Day in the center with Cupid's arrow, born on February 14, 1915. Nat Cole bowed on the night of Gordon's 50th birthday, February 14-15, 1965, although the last curtain call came in the Wee Small Hours of the 15th. Together, they created the perfect Valentine's Day Song.
Thank you, all. This airing of Steyn's Serenade Song of the Week is a special presentation of The Mark Steyn Club. We do enjoy your comments on the show. Steyn Clubbers are welcome to leave them below - or anybody can leave them over at Serenade Radio, where they love hearing from listeners.
Steyn's Song of the Week airs thrice weekly on Serenade Radio in the UK, one or other of which broadcasts is certain to be convenient for whichever part of the world you're in:
5.30pm Sunday London (12.30pm New York)
5.30am Monday London (4.30pm Sydney)
9pm Thursday London (1pm Vancouver)
Whichever you prefer, you can listen from anywhere on the planet right here.
