A childhood memory: It’s snowing, I’m nine or ten years old, curled up on the old green couch in the sitting room, ogling the toys in the Sears Christmas Catalogue; and we have a Mitch Miller album playing There Is a Tavern in the Town.
Mitch was big back then, leading his chorus in an inexhaustible round of good old songs that everybody knew: it was always easy to “sing along with Mitch.” These songs were already old when he recorded them. They were, if I might use a word that doesn’t get much use anymore, Americana. Part of our daily lives. Everyone I knew had at least a few Mitch Miller albums. He was on TV, too.
This was popular music with a capital P. Songs your grandma and grandpa knew as well as you did. We could all sing them together.
Can that be said of our music anymore?
“Be kind to your web-footed friends, / For the duck may be somebody’s mooooother….” 🎵
Yep, I remember Mitch very well. I sang along with him and others of the day.
I watched Mitch Miller on tv. Looked forward to it every week.
I can remember waiting for the second movie in the Fox Theater and a reel of Mitch would play where you sang along to the bouncing ball – and everyone did. So much fun to have been alive in the 1950’s.
If you needed harmony, you could always get it from Mitch Miller.
Songs like the one in the post, even if it’s the first time hearing it, you can still sing along. And we did have one Mitch Miller album.
The Sears Christmas Catalogue, how I loved looking through that. Wow, so many wonderful toys found within! Me and my brother would circle the ones we wanted. A few times we got what was circled!
The songs played today. Most seem bland, flat, featureless, couldn’t sing along. At least that’s what my brother-in-law here listens to. Now, they do play a lot of the music you hear in the US. And the old farmer across our canal, is now playing loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear, Elbert Humperdinck’s, Delayla, Frank Sinatra and many such singers and such songs from the 60s.
I used to love watching Mitch Miller on TV, hoping in vain that he’d call out the name of my home town. From what I understand, he was quite influential as a producer, in the recording industry.