If Music be the Food of Love...........

I was giving a talk on “My Kind of Music – A Personal Selection” yesterday, to a group of sixty plus people. I had put this talk together about three or four years ago, and I recall I had great difficulty in deciding what I should leave out of the musical examples, as I am restricted to approximately 30 - 35 minutes of music at the most. So I used the criteria of the music had to be something I had either performed or was in some way connected with in my life.

The resulting choices were quite interesting – two of the pieces were piano music I had learnt to play many years ago (Country Gardens by Percy Grainger and Rustle of Spring by Christian Sinding), another choice came about because a composer (as a child) was apprenticed to a piano makers in London [Collard & Collard] and the first piano I learnt to play on was my grandparents Collard & Collard and was probably built at the same time as the composer was working in the factory! (By the way - the composer was Henry Charles Litolff)

In the course of my introduction I spoke of my quite wide range of musical tastes. This got me thinking back to the days of my youth, and the pop music that was around in those days.

LONNIE DONEGAN

I recall my “hero” at that time was one Lonnie Donegan (& his skiffle group) I wonder how many of you can remember such classic titles as:-
The Battle of New Orleans, Does Your Chewing Gum Loose its Flavour [on the Bedpost Overnight], Beans in my Ears, My Old Man’s a Dustman, Puttin’ on the Style, & Jimmie Brown the Newsboy?

Around the same period were The Everly Brothers, Tommy Steele, Johnny Mathis, Simon and Garfunkel and orchestras led by Bert Kaempfert, Herb Alpert, James Last, Geoff Love and Ray Conniff.

Folk Music was in vogue, and such groups as The Spinners, The Seekers, The Fivepenny Piece, Steeleye Span and soloists Rod McKuen and Joan Baez featured in my LP collection.

So how many of the following can you name?????

Answers Tomorrow!