Fog!

A recent combination of cold nights and mild, damp mornings in this corner of Britain led to one of my favourite weather conditions manifesting itself over the weekend and served as a welcome reminder of why autumn is the season I enjoy most - fog!  From Friday through to Sunday there were varying degrees of pea-soupiness as the days progressed, with a particularly fine and atmospheric curtain of thick fog occurring first thing in the morning and materialising again in the evening, with wisps of mist lasting well into the day (and sometimes still in evidence even now).

source - imgur

I do love me a bit of fog (in case you hadn't guessed) and got terribly excited when glancing out of the window on Saturday night to see - well, not much really beyond a wall of dim white haze but the realisation that this was the first proper ground cloud of autumn practically made my day.  It's all I can do to stop myself from going out into it for a walk and sometimes I do give in to the temptation to venture forth and embrace the murkiness.  There's just something about fog and mist that really gets in amongst me - the way in envelops everything and gives it an eerie, otherworldly appearance that no other weather can replicate; the manner in which it is inextricably linked to this time of year, when the ground is covered with fallen leaves and the trees become gaunt, shadowy figures thrusting their branches out from the brume.  People and cars appear and disappear almost out of nowhere (in the case of cars sometimes unnecessarily so if the driver hasn't deigned to put on any lights - one of my few frustrations related to foggy conditions) and places one knows and recognises in clear conditions become strange and unfamiliar, all thanks to the interaction of cold and warm, moist air/ ground.

Women wear "smog masks" in London on the 17th
November 1953
source - The Guardian

Of course fog has not always had a harmless, inoffensive air (ahem!) about it, especially when it mixes with air pollution brought about by car fumes and the like to create the dreaded smog, much of which plagued many parts of Britain right up to the 1960s (as the above footage shows) - the most famous being the Great Smog of London during 1952 and 1953 which resulted in over 4,000 deaths and 100,000 people suffering from respiratory illnesses as a direct result.  Thankfully things have moved on in the subsequent 68 years and we are now able to go out in the fog without having to worry about catching a respiratory disease - at least not from that source!  In other respects however we are seeing a repeat of events from nearly seventy years ago, with masks once again being very much a necessity in all weathers.

A smoggy Ludgate Hill, London, captured in November 1922
source - The Guardian

But we're not here to dwell on the past horrors of smog but rather the joyful ghostliness of natural fog and what better way to celebrate it and the coming of autumn than with a selection of songs from my favourite era, the 1920s and '30s, all of which reference that most vaporous form of weather.  

We start in 1927 with a recording composed by the famous American cornetist and piano player Bix Beiderbecke who is on fine form in this 9th September 1927 New York performance where we find ourselves In A Mist.

Skiping forward to 1929 and the great Duke Ellington & his Cotton Club Orchestra perform a tune that is particularly evocative of a hazy dawn breaking over the rural farm on a brisk autumnal day - Misty Mornin', recorded here on the 3rd May 1929.  Ellington first cut this haunting melody on the 22nd November 1928 and would go on to make several different versions over the years so I am sure this will not be the last time it appears on this blog in one form or another.

The most famous fog-based song from the Thirties is of course George and Ira Gerswhin's A Foggy Day, which will forever be linked with the incomparable Fred Astaire and his consummate performance of it in the 1937 film A Damsel In Distress.  Having featured that recording back when I last did a fog-derived post in 2010(!) I thought I would feature another version of it this time by the British dance band leader Geraldo (real name Gerald Bright) and his Orchestra, with vocalist Cyril Grantham doing a good job with the lyrics in this recording made some time in 1938.  

We finish with this 1934 recording of Lost In A Fog, another standard of the day that was recorded by various different artists including Cassino Simpson, Coleman Hawkins and The Dorsey Brothers.  On this occasion however we hear it sung by well-known American singer and band leader Rudy Vallée, in a version that reached Number 4 in the U.S. charts in that year.

A beautiful shot of a fog-covered Richmond Bridge, London
source - Pinterest

Well that's it for this mist-enshrouded post - I hope you've enjoyed reading my thoughts on this most mesmerising of meteorological conditions, or at the very least had your toes tapping along to the accompanying musical miasma.  Is it foggy where you are?  Let me know what the weather's doing where you are and what your favourite type is in the comments below!

All aboard the song train

The starting of a new job seems to have coincided with a bit of a downturn in vintage news (not to mention my third cold in as many months!) - hence I have been absent from the blogging circuit for nearly two weeks, for which I must continue to crave forgiveness!  I still haven't forgotten about you all though (I read all your posts of an evening, or at the weekend, as something very much to look forward to) nor this blog of mine.

Sitting on the train during the commute into work I often find myself thinking of potential subjects for this site and, while listening to my portable i-gramophone last week, it occurred to me that the very mode of transportation I was using - and the music I had playing - would make an excellent topic.



The railway train has always had an instantly recognisable rhythm and one that naturally lends itself to a musical beat.  There have been countless songs over the years featuring trains and rail travel to some extent or another but it is the half-a-dozen or so favourites in my music collection that I intend to focus on here.

The first song, Choo-Choo, neatly sums up the steam train in typical Thirties onomatopoeic style and is wonderfully redolent of period rail travel.  Written and recorded by American bandleader Frankie Trumbauer in 1930, it was almost immediately cut by a multitude of other bands on both sides of the Atlantic.  While the original Trumbauer recording is excellent, my favourite from the U.S. is Paul Whiteman's version, above, made in the same year.



In the U.K. the two Jacks - Jack Payne and Jack Hylton - both recorded versions of Choo-Choo a year later in 1931 and again, while Jack Payne's version is wonderful, Hylton's arrangement just shades it for me.



Arguably a more famous "Choo-Choo" is Glenn Miller's brilliant 1941 record - Chattanooga Choo-Choo, a song that instantly conjures up images of transcontinental railway journeys in the 1940s and '50s.



A year or two earlier Glenn Miller had had similar success, reaching number 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart with another train-themed number - Tuxedo Junction.  The song had actually been written in 1939 by American bandleader Erskine Hawkins and while his original version made it to number 7 in the charts it remains less well-known today than the classic Miller arrangement.



Another railway tune that has become inextricably linked to its [co-]composer - so much so that it is invariably called his "signature song" and found in every compilation of his music - is Duke Ellington's Take The 'A' Train.  It is a reputation that it thoroughly deserves, being one of the defining examples of 1940s big band music never mind rail-based songs.



One of my very favourite "songs of the track", though, is this one - Honky-Tonk Train Blues.  Although written and first recorded as long ago as 1927 by the noted early boogie-woogie pianist Meade Lux Lewis, this 1938 arrangement by Bob Crosby (Bing's brother) with Bob Zurke on the piano really rolls along splendidly.

For me all of these help rekindle some of the fun and romance that seems to have been lost from modern train travel, as I commute to and from work in a characterless and brightly-coloured plastic tube.  Sometimes I can even imagine seeing something steaming past the station platform, or pulling the far more luxurious carriage I picture myself travelling in... porter! My case please!

Musical Interlude: Duke Ellington - The Mooche, 1928

It's been far too quiet here lately; I don't like it(!).



Duke Ellington's The Mooche is certainly one of my Desert Island Discs; if it is one of the powers of music to take the listener to to another place, to stir their imagination, then this tune certainly does that for me. It is peerlessly evocative of a particular era and lifestyle long since vanished and never fails to leave me imagining being in a smoke-filled New York/Chicago nightclub, or standing on a dimly-lit, foggy street corner: