Season 295 is colourful

This is a Gretchen Peters song from two years ago. For those who love a good murder ballad...

 
Try a little tenderness

Here's a cute little song written in 1926 by Harry Woods, and made famous by Al Jolson and many others.



Harry Woods was a really interesting character. Despite being born (1896) with no digits on his left hand, with the encouragement of his mother, he became a pianist, before becoming a songwriter on Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s.

Perhaps because of his disability, he was also an irascible personality, and an angry drunk. Songwriter J Fred Coots (who wrote "Santa Claus is Coming To Town" and who was Woods' almost exact contemporary) tells a story of Woods and fellow-songwriter Al Dubin going on a bender in Philadelphia, where Woods got into a fight with a bartender. Woods soon had the bartender on the floor, gripping him round the neck with his right hand and pounding him with the the stump of his left. I've read different versions of the story over the years, but this is how Coots tells it:
there's a donnybrook and they're rolling about. Then this very well-dressed elegant gentleman saunters in and is heard to remark "My word, what's going on here? What's happening?" Al's at the other end of the bar and tells this guy "Don't worry, it's just a friendly disagreement." The gentleman enquires, "Is that the bartender fighting?" "Yeah, it is," comes the response. "Well then, who is the other man?" pointing to Harry. Al chuckles and says "Oh, he's a songwriter. His name is Harry Woods. He's the guy that wrote 'Try A Little Tenderness!"
Michael Whorf (2012) American Popular Song Composers: Oral Histories, 1920s–1950s, p62: Jefferson NC, McFarland Publishing. ISBN0786490624​

Other stories have Woods' victim as a loudmouthed member of the audience he was playing to in the bar, the police taking him away, and a woman enquiring after the identity of "that horrible man." All contain the same punchline (punchline :D ). But on the whole, I trust Coots' version. It's told by a contemporary of Woods, it names a location, it names the incident that provoked the fight (an arm-wrestling match gone wrong - & I doubt an established songwriter would need to be supplementing his income playing bars), & it names his drinking companion.

The incident must have occurred sometime after Woods returned from England (where in fact he co-wrote TALT - it's a staple of the Great British Songbook), i.e., sometime after 1937. He'd made enough money from songwriting to retire around 1948; to Glendale AZ in fact, where in 1970 he was knocked down by a car & killed, right outside his front door. J Fred Coots, one year younger than Woods, outlived him by another 5 years.
 
Here is my entry:

 
This is a favorite song of mine. An old Irish folk song that came to America in the late 1700's, and morphed and changed some over time as songs like this do.

 
Caught up to here. I think all the videos have been added to the playlist but if by any chance, yours isn't just PM me and I'll add it.

An interesting mixture of songs some oldies, some less well known and a few classics. You are all really great and such a range of songs and styles. Keep them coming. Don't worry about song limits, I'm lifting them as of now.

:smileybounce:

 
Here's one that I recorded earlier this week but decided not to use unless you lifted the limit. Recorded by Johnny Horton (Battle of New Orleans, North to Alaska, etc.).

 
Caught up to here with another excellent selection of songs. Again, if I've missed you off the playlist please PM me and I'll add your song.
 
It looks like a 16:9 video has been saved as a 3:4 video so you have become long and thin. I would recommend my video editor but it's only available for Linux.

Correction. It's now available for Mac and Windows as well. Try OpenShot video editor. It's open source and available as a free download. Relatively easy to use. It has a basic mode and a more advanced mode and I not, so far, needed to go beyond the basic mode.

It has a much flashier website than last time I looked. http://www.openshot.org

Sorry about that. Mine is an older 32 bit Linux version. I reckon that when they ported it to Mac and Windows, they decided it wasn't worth creating a 32 bit version.

For correcting problems like the one described above, try ffmpeg. It's a command line tool but it's useful for that kind of thing. In fact it's basically a video and audio conversion tool.

My video camera that I use for seasons videos stores the formatting data in a separate file from the video itself so if I play back a "raw" 16:9 video file, I get the same problem- the player treats it as a 4:3 video. I use ffmpeg to add in the formatting data so it will play properly as a 16:9 video. I have a script file specially for the purpose. https://www.ffmpeg.org

You can also extract the audio from a video file for editing separately.
 
Purple Istanbul - Live Mashup The Racket Downstairs

Howdy Seasonistas!

Geoff, we were getting ready for a gig this week and I had no time to record a video for your season, but my wife cut this together this morning from footage of the gig and pointed out that the song fits the season. However this post breaks a few rules:

  • I have posted this song to the Seasons before. (although this is a new recording from last night's gig)
  • My wife neglected to put Season 295 on the title page, as we usually do. (although I have included it the Youtube title)
  • The ukulele in the video spends a good portion of its time not being played and a bit of time being muted by an errant purple scarf. :)
  • The video is seven minutes long. (not technically against the rules, but that's a pretty long video)

For the above reasons I considered not posting it here, but because the final rule in the first post is to have fun, and this video is about as much fun as can be had in a roomful of people with their clothes on, I posted it anyway. Thanks for a great Season, Geoff!

 
Aloha Seasonistas!
There are two little Yellow Birds that hang out in my back yard frequently.
So I give you...

 
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