Programming note: If you missed the audio edition of Steyn's Song of the Week on Serenade Radio this afternoon, it re-airs at 5.30am GMT on Monday, which is 9.30pm Sunday on the US West Coast and Monday afternoon in Australia. You can listen from anywhere on the planet right here.
Welcome to the final show of our trio of On the Town much-more-music specials for New Year weekend. In this episode Steyn tips his hat to some of those we lost in 2021. It's not meant to be comprehensive - Mark has paid tribute to many others along the way these last twelve months - but he notes a quintet of writers and performers he didn't get to, as well as a couple of big-time composers and lyricists. It's an hour of songs known and unknown performed by a wide range of singers and bandleaders, from Duke Ellington to Van Morrison, Nancy Sinatra to Sinéad O'Connor, Anthony Newley to Linda Ronstadt - and including a musical Christmas at Hogwarts.
Click above to listen.
Three of those we salute are pictured above in the company of Frank Sinatra, Roger Moore, Elizabeth Taylor and Bob Dylan.
You can hear our two other weekend specials - a cavalcade of New Year Number Ones and the songs of 1921 that lasted down the decades - here and here.
~On the Town is a special production of The Mark Steyn Club. For more on the Steyn Club, see here.
There's a whole cavalcade of musical delights over on our Netflix-style music home page, where you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Herman's Hermits to Liza Minnelli; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's songs, Simon after Garfunkel, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from the woes of the world.
