Bix Beiderbecke & Paul Whiteman - Lonely Melody, 1928

[WilliamFogle]

I love this video!

[colette10ful]

Music like this only painfully reminds us of how much we have lost, as a culture, and as a country. But it is there to remind us and our dolt society of what made this country great, once....

[carole131]

I so agree with Genia!

[robchalfen]

Bix doesn't solo on Ramona, it's just an overstuffed piece of parlor cheeze

[Aberwitz88]

Nice! 5*****

[genia106]

My Dear Grzegorz,

This is the sixth time I am reposting my comment.

I LOVE NY! I love your video! I love the Banjos! I love the song!  I love the lyrics!

YOU have outdone yourself, the photos just flow with the SMASHING music.

Unlike you and Corrie, I would love to be sitting suspend over NYC sipping my Martini and being served by 2 handsome butler. Merci for this GREAT GREAT GREAT presentaion. Manhattan Mooniac.

I love the poem, MY sentiments exactly!

[240252]

Genia, Rudy and I only once flew around those eagle's heads in our little french avionette and I still feel cadaverous chill in my blood when I remember that trip. Never again! After we landed we had to get stone drunk at "Cinderella" (Broadway/48th) where at last The Wolverines' jazz put us back to life again

[historygeeek]

@240252 Share your sentiments as often as you can, Please Sir. We need them now more than ever.

America was once a country of Idealists. Craftsmen. people of vision. It's all gone now. You remember

what is was really like to live in a country that was unbeaten. Thank you for taking us there!

[240252]

@historygeeek Thank you for your warm and sorrowful comment. I share your deep feelings about America. And I unite my tears with yours over what's been lost forever from American spirit and the values that were once fundamental for that brave and clever nation. The greed and lust for domination corrodes that once beautiful soul.

[historygeeek]

@240252 I had a gallery showing of some of my painted black and white photographs about 15 years ago. I selected this tune as the theme. It played over and over from a 1936 Air Castle radio in the corner of the gallery.

It just felt right.... :)

[historygeeek]

@240252 Back then a Blue Collar American Male would clean up and put on a suit and tie to take his girl out to dinner on friday night....... A nightclub in 1939 would have had many "classes" of people in them. But it would have been difficult to tell the difference by how they dressed and conducted themselves. There were standards then. It had nothing to do with how much money you made.

[genia106]

Grzegorz,

I just reposted my comment 3 times,

I hope it appears just once.

[dzheger]

And the B & W photos of NY are fabulous, I must add, though those people, fearless of height, make me dizzy.

[dzheger]

In spite of the name, the delightful tune exudes nothing but joy.

[240252]

Thanks! :-)

[Corrie121]

Great post. Like the pics, but I almost fell from my chair when viewing them. Could be vertigo - caused by seeing these guys perched high above the ground !!

Thanks for sharing.

[240252]

Hello Corrie, I hope your vertigo was not too serious! Well, I can understand it very well as all my live I've been suffering from a terrible high anxiety. In the times when the tv antennae were installed high on the rooftops, I was not able even to think,I could climb up the staircase and do it myself. So, just the imagining it could be me who's sitting high there under the clouds, on the eagle's head ..or enjoying myself on the skyscraper's scaffolding with aglass of champaigne , make me sick

[HarborGuy]

Whiteman come thru again......Great arrangements and great band sound.  Love the pictures.......

[240252]

Yes, I decided to upload one more Whiteman's piece first: because it is nort only Whiteman who makes this music great, but also - Bix. And second - that Coslow's composition has some inner nervous note, some hidden vigour mixed with a "metropolitan" malencholy. All that matched the old photos of Manhattan very well

[julitajuli]

Whiteman was very smart to engage Bix

[julitajuli]

"(...) But, ah! Manhattan´s sights and sounds, her smells,

Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes

From being of her a part, her subtle spells,

Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums

O God! the stark, unutterable pity,

To be dead, and never again behold my city. "

(James Weldon Johnson)

[240252]

Thanks julitajuli for that poem! Was James Weldon Johnson the first Afro American professor of literature at NY University?

[julitajuli]

He was certainly one of the first African-American professors at New York University and professor of Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. For me, he is not only one of the most interesting representatives of the Harlem Renaissance but also one of the most exciting "voices" of New York in the'20s.

[Dagarvs]

super tune, amazing slide show- had to scroll up just to get away from it, first listening!

great job!!