If you enjoy Steyn's Song of the Week at SteynOnline and on Serenade Radio, please note that there will be a live stage edition during the 2025 Mark Steyn Cruise - along with many other favourite features from SteynOnline and The Mark Steyn Show. More details here.
~If you missed Mark's Song of the Week last Sunday on Serenade Radio, here's a chance to hear it at SteynOnline. This selection is a song of quintessentially American swagger and self-confidence. From the Steyn archives, the songwriting team of Kander & Ebb, their star Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra's musical director Vincent Falcone and the legendary 106-year-old Broadway director George Abbott join Mark to trace the history of a blockbuster song.
To listen to the show, please click above.
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~The show airs again on Serenade Radio Monday morn at 5.30am London time - that's 9.30pm Sunday on the US and Canadian West Coast, so a kind of late-night vibe to it, but it's early Monday afternoon in Oz, so a mellow post-prandial feel to it. Serenade has an additional rerun of the show on Thursday at 9pm UK time. Whichever you prefer, we hope you'll tune in. You can listen from anywhere on the planet right here.
~Thank you for your enthusiastic comments about our Song of the Week. Of our last episode on "Roses of Picardy", Teresa Maupin, a California member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
Loved your duet with Monique, along with the beautiful clarinet, violin and guitar. Very smooth.
Virginia Steyn Clubber Todd Lewis says:
'Roses of Picardy' to me is highly appropriate for what people are feeling at this moment. The song to me was all about a desperate longing for normality, a return to stability and humanity. What else would you write in a time almost devoid of a rational regard for the lives of ordinary people? Who needs all this political perversity? We are despising this and rejecting it now as well. The song is old timey but timely.
Another Steyn Clubber, James Fulford, passes along this Broadway reminiscence:
Here's a story from Helen Hayes, whose husband, playwright Charles MacArthur, fought in World War One AND Two:
'Shortly after D-Day, I was looking out of the window of our house in Nyack when suddenly I saw him coming up the walk. My excitement was indescribable. And it was increased by something at once ludicrous and marvelously romantic. There Charlie was, in full uniform, his battle ribbons across his chest, his lieutenant-colonel's oak leaves on his shoulders—carrying a partly beat-up rose in his hand. He had plucked that rose in a garden in Normandy, and kept it in a container of water all the way home on the plane.'
I'm sure he was thinking of this song, even if Picardy is miles from Omaha Beach.
From Raymond Kujawa:
Mark commented that the song was 'muscular enough' for multiple adaptations. Being myself originally from the Philadelphia area (on the New Jersey side) and my father having played with a Mummers string band (Hegeman String Band), I wondered whether a string band might have tackled 'Roses of Picardy' sometime in the past. I found one example. On the Haydn Wood music webpage, there is a black and white photograph of the Woodland String Band playing at the Philadelphia Mummers Parade on January 1, 1949, and their theme that year was 'Roses of Picardy.'
Chris, a New York Steyn Clubber, writes:
I was struck by that 'Victorian parlour song' reference about 'Roses of Picardy' but felt that was immediately spot on. Unfortunately, it ALL seems so very Victorian doesn't it? 3/4 of all people under 40 (maybe under 50?) will have no idea what that even means. As Mark says 'And which men in a new Britain will still say "This was their finest hour"? For when you lose your future, you also lose your past.'
I remain amazed at the astounding # of people who not only have no interest in the past accomplishments and sacrifices of our forebears but also see no reason to turn away from celebrity Tik Toks to come to grips with their own histories. I remember Armistice Day so well --speeches, poppies, somber music---and it does set the mise en scene better than 'Veterans Day' which is quite sterile out of the horrors of real war--- but I clearly have no problem with remembering all the servicemen (yes, and women too but let's be honest...) who trod the beaches, and deserts and oceans for me and our country.
Thank you, Mark, for the reprise and your younger, sl less weary voice.
From England Alison Castellina adds:
I had just got interested in lyricist, writer and barrister Frederick Weatherly (born 1848) through On the Town and lo and behold! we have more of him and sung versions of 'Roses of Picardy' (1916).
The idea that it is the 'last great Victorian parlour song' seems spot on, seeing his age when he wrote it. He was clearly desperate to be a serious poet which explains why he entered the Newdigate (poetry) prize and failed to win it, three times. He married three times, too, and only made KC a couple of years before he died, still working at the Bar in his seventies. He was very well known in his day and probably was not honoured because between his first depressed (but not divorced) wife and his third happy marriage he lived with 'Maude' who put herself down as "Mrs Weatherly" on the census (tut,tut). I will try to get his autobiography in the British LIbrary (difficult to get otherwise).
The only flaw in 'Roses of Picardy' is the word "silvery". It does not quite fit two notes or three and has to be sung 'sil-ver-y' which is heavy. The compensation, of course, are the heartbreaking lines 'But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy. Tis the rose that I keep in my heart!". The Battle of the Somme took place in Picardy in 1916 (though that may be coincidental). I think his motto said that love trumps all things including work and duty (so he was a true romantic). I loved hearing it in French.
To be fair to the lyricist, "silvery" is Steyn's word, Alison, not Weatherly's. He wrote "silver", two syllables which Haydn Wood stretches across three notes - "si-il-ver". Mark is not a fan of melismas at the best of times, and that one is far too obtrusive for his tastes.
One more from Nicola Timmerman in francophone Ontario:
Do you like French songs so much because your Belgian mother spoke French?
No, she was a Flemish Belgian - and that's one language Mark has never sung in.
This airing of Steyn's Serenade Song of the Week is a special presentation of The Mark Steyn Club. We launched the Steyn Club over seven years ago, and in this our eighth year we're immensely heartened by all the longtime SteynOnline regulars - from Fargo to Fiji, Madrid to Malaysia, West Virginia to Witless Bay - who've signed up to be a part of it. Membership in The Mark Steyn Club also comes with non-musical benefits, including:
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