Seasons of the Ukulele

A weekly song challenge for ukulele players - all welcome. Find out more here

Season 705 - High Fidelity… a novel theme

UkeFoote

Paul Desmond's "Take Five", for concert ukulele, tenor ukulele, baritone ukulele (off camera), and Ashbory Ubass. Thanks again for hosting, Del!

DelGriff

THE PRIZE

My favourite entry this week will win a music themed small trophy, something, or exactly, like the one pictured below (depending on local Amazon availability), engraved with the winner’s name, the Season number and the word ‘WINNER’.

Maybe not as generous as last time, but sending a uke all the way to Wendy in Australia nearly bankrupted me! 😆

Edwin

Hi Del! Thanks for a fun theme. I had a crack at an original for it. Earlier this week I looked through my bookshelves for anything that sounded like a plausible song title, and the first thing I saw that seemed to work was Magnus Mills' "The Field Of The Cloth Of Gold". I enjoy Magnus Mills' writing. He has an unusual but entertaining style, kind of repetitive but developing the story a little more with each repetition. Maybe, now I come to think of it, like the literary equivalent of a looper pedal.

Anyway. The song. At the beginning, I was following the basic premise of the book, but it's diverged a bit. I had something specific in mind, but I think it could mean a lot of things. It can mean whatever you want it to mean, in the end.

It also features my initial experiments with a Low D harmonica. I only discovered you could get lower octave harmonicas last week so obviously I had to have one.

uke4ia

It took me longer than planned to figure out what song I want to do. In the meantime, this is my one oldie for the Season. This is Elvis Costello's "Man Out of Time" played on tiple, from Season 347.

YorkSteve

I went to see Elbow a few weeks ago. If people know them at all (and many don't), they probably know "One Day Like This", their anthem which featured in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Here's another of their slow-to-build-but-big-at-the-end songs, which shares its title with books by Neville Shute, Bonnie Woods, Angel Lee, and probably loads of others.

CanadaJim

Here's my oldie Oor Hamlet by Adam McNoughton from Season 549, hardly a polished performance, but lotsa words to fit in there.

DelGriff

Evening all. Apologies for my lack of attention today - been rather distracted by my daughter’s brilliant GCSE exam results, which we received this morning. I’m a very happy and proud dad! :-)

Edwin

DelGriff yay, congratulations to her!

UkeCan1

Saturday (the new theme doesn't post here till Sunday), when I was calling to assemble my prospective quartet with Daisy, Rosie, and Trish, and noticed that two of us had flower names, and thought that maybe Trish might become, say, Marigold, and I could be, perhaps, Dandelion, and then we could name our quartet something suitably floral … I thought of this Lynn Anderson song as something we might try together with a ukulele at the open mic … and hoped for the unlikely event that it might fit this week's Season.

Imagine my surprise to see it #2 on the Goodreads list!

Well, the Flower People didn't song it with me, so I did it myself (accompanied instead by the usual chorus of cockatoos).

I always thought it was called "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden", but in fact it is called simply "Rose Garden".

Apparently Goodreads had the same erroneous thought, because the song does not in fact have the same name as the book. I actually remember reading this book as a young person - it's about a 16-year-old schizophrenic girl.

Anyway, there are a zillion books in the world, and of course there are several on Amazon called "Rose Garden", so it still works, I guess!

Congrats to your daughter!

UkeCan1

Here's one from the High Fidelity playlist:

Love Hurts by Nazareth

AlanDP

There are several books listed at Amazon with this title.

MsBean

I'm no Tiny Tim; I don't think I've ever watched him bring this song. I haven't read the poetry collection either. But the song has just entered the public domain, so I decided to try it.

IIRC the title was somewhere in the 680s in the GoodReads list Del linked.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32447064-tiptoe-through-the-tulips

https://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/collection/189/171a

UkeCan1

There are two songs on 705's "High Fidelity" list whose titles are a question (neither of which includes an actual question mark, so yes, I included one in my video title for 706 cred).

I've already done "Do You Love Me" (by the Contours … and more recently "Do You Love Me?" from Fiddler on the Roof, which is an entirely different song, and does conclude with a suitable interrogatory punctuation symbol).

So that left me with the Bee Gees' "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (?)".

Which means I've now done three sad Del-esque broken heart songs three days in a row, which I trust will make him happy … or sad, which seems to make him happy … or something.

Anyway, it's a beautiful song, when you strip away the Gibb of it all … not that I'm claiming my version is an improvement on theirs … except it does start with kookaburras laughing somewhere behind me … and I've never heard the brothers G do THAT.

Which hopefully will make Val happy too. I mean … KOOKABURRAS! Anybody who isn't made happy by kookaburras is made of stone, and I don't think that applies to anyone here.

uke4ia

This is "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division. It was on the GoodReads list. I found 5 different books with this title on Amazon before I stopped counting, and none of them was a biography of Ian Curtis.

uke4ia

Here's another GoodReads selection, which shares its title with a better known book: "Brave New World" by Michael Penn, who is Sean Penn's brother and Aimee Mann's husband. This was the follow-up single to his one hit "No Myth" ("What if I were Romeo in black jeans?"). It got some radio play on the new music station in Boston.

OnlyUkeThatMatters

Too many good songs for me to choose from, so I used a little algorithm…

First I eliminated the (six) songs I've already played for the Seasons. Then I set aside songs by musicians whose songs I've already played for the Seasons. Finally, I randomized the list of the remaining 50+ songs.

"Terry" by Twinkle ended up at the top of the list. Just one listen, and I'd found my song! I played my tiple as a nod to Jimmy Page's twelve-string guitar on the original 1964 recoding. So I've sung a song mentioned in High Fidelity 🙂

I did a little more digging online and learned (from wikipedia) about Terry, "a pictorial biography of Terry Fox written by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in 2005 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Fox's death." So I've sung a song that shares it's name with a book as well 😛

Whee!!

UkeCan1

Given we've already established that, in this age of anybody-can-publish-a-book-for-free, pretty much every song title is also a book title, for my Monday twofer, I decided to limit my choices to books that are either reasonably well known, or relate in some way to the song or artist.

"How Can I Keep From Singing", an 1868 hymn apparently written by "Pauline T" (lyrics) and Robert Lowry (music), with a more political third verse added around 1950 by Doris Plenn, and later somewhat secularized and popularized by Pete Seeger, along with other folk revivalists (and not, as Plenn and Seeger believed and promulgated, a traditional Quaker hymn, of which there apparently is no such thing, because early Quakers didn't sing!).

There is a 1981 biography of Pete Seeger with a 4.4 Amazon rating, which seems a lot closer to the intent of the book title part of the 705 theme than some of the other 706-qualified songs I checked out.

My lyrics are close to the Seeger version, my chords and melody are closer to Enya's, from her first album that I played and played back in the day.

DelGriff

And that last flurry of entries brings Season 705 to an end. Thank you all for your participation, your enthusiasm and your musical talents. I’ll be back later in the week to properly wrap things up and to announce the winner.

In the meantime, head over to Val’s Season 706?!?!?!?!?! 🙂

dr_mitch

Thanks for hosting Del. Another week, where I'd hoped to get more songs in, but alas, it was not to be.

UkeCan1

What a fun week. Thanks, Del!

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