Our technology this morning once again got busy biting the hand that feeds it. “Outage!” said Verizon. Hours go by. They’re working on it.
Finally this broke through: Joy to the World, sung by Mitch Miller and his chorus.
There’s a catch, though. We only have volume on the main computer, not the laptop.
Oh, forsooth… let me try to catch up.
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?
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I didn’t know a family that didn’t have at least one Mitch Miller record album. And he had a TV show, too, that ran from 1961 to 1964.
He had a beard. Holy cow. Really, you had to be there to appreciate how unusual that was, back then. Almost like having a third eye.
Miller put together a “gang” of male singers and performed old-fashioned songs that everybody knew. I don’t know that we have that kind of cultural cohesion anymore. Who couldn’t sing There Is a Tavern in the Town? The main selling point of Mitch’s albums was that you could surely sing along. We all knew the words.
Today, in the midst of our now fractured society, there’s something fantastically appealing about the very idea of “sing-along.” But now what would we sing? What could we all agree on?
Not much.
Maybe we ought to be working on getting back good things we’ve lost.
This is the theme song for Mitch Miller’s hit TV show, Sing Along With Mitch, vintage 1961.
I think everybody I knew had a Mitch Miller record album or two. Back then, he was just about the only guy who had a beard but wasn’t a beatnik. Good grief, remember them? Some of us heard a rumor that a certain person in the neighborhood had actually become a beatnik, and grown a beard, and a bunch of us kids stood outside his house one night for I don’t know how long, hoping to get a glimpse of such a curiosity.
Anyhow, Mitch provided millions of people with songs they could sing in front of their kiddies without embarrassment, and entertainment galore.
If he tried his act today, he’d either make a fortune like he never dreamed of, or be arrested for hate speech and uninclusiveness.