A Complement to Dixie

Once again, Blogger has gone all Frogger on me. Pour quoi? Oh, well, on to the gist:

A companion piece for Dixie's Land popped into my head today, as I suffered the Torments of the Damned [trans.: professional seminar, followed by dentist appointment]. It's to the tune of The Bonnie Blue Flag (1861), an absolutely rollicking tune, and one of the Confederacy's few hit songs. A midi file of it can be found here; watch out for that opening snare drum!

Mind you, I don't follow the original rhythm exactly, but I hope my valiant public will overlook the liberty, since (in the best tradition of 19th century American popular song) the original lyric is pretty free with the rhythm, in spots. For goodness' sake, though, be sure to sing the last two syllables of the first and fifth lines of each stanza in the proper clipped tone, or the whole thing'll go limp.

We must protect the kiddies—
The tender little tots—
Sanitizing violence
In cinematic plots;
But should they take a classic
And make it Mallomar®,
Then that is when the Thought Police
Will go a bit too far.

Too far, too far,
The prigs 'll go too far:
A re-make of Bonnie and Clyde
Without a single scar!

I don't know how they did it,
But somehow it was done:
Bonnie Parker buys it, but—
We never see a gun.
The final burst of bullets
Is hidden by the car;
But when the picture fades to pink,
They go too bloody far!

Too far, too far, &c.

Farewell to Warren Beatty!
Farewell to Arthur Penn!
Censorship has done away
With freedom-loving men.
The Fewest and the Proudest
Are killed in Kandahar
To make the World a Safer Place
For prigs who go too far.

Too far, too far, &c.

Lyric © 2007 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

A tip o' the hat to Miss Sallie Parker, who furnished me with the gen re Arthur Penn and wised me up before I committed a faux pas at the end of the second stanza. Ta, My Gal Sal!

Too much emphasis on the re- in re-make, you say? Well, get stuffed!

Articulate

I sent out 47 copies of my third-of-a-CD on Saturday from the General Post Office. By Monday, my DAMP had already received feedback from one addressee, an 82-year-old with a really-o, truly-o listing in the Internet Broadway Database. Not a long list of credits, mind you; but the number of people with any credits at all is teensy, compared to the mass of humanity. I won't name him, since he didn't say that his comments were "for attribution."

He was most complimentary, but the one remark that tickled me was that he thought my lyrics "articulate."

I feel just like Barack Obama.

Little does he know, but I wrote every single word of those lyrics while standing on my hinder legs!!

Nouveau Message

When I signed on through Blogger just now, the whole darned operation was done in French. Even now, it's asking me whether I want enregistrer en mode brouillon or publier. Perhaps to honor new French President Kaposis Sarcoma (or whatever le diable his nom is)?

On my way to Nino's Tuscany last night to sing Jerry Scott his birthday song, I was reworking the release, which had inadvertently contained an identity in died/dyed. When I got up to sing it, it was too dark to read my chicken scratches, and I'd had enough Peroni, Pouilly-Fuissé and Campari to bomb royally, and bomb royally is what I proceeded to do. Ah, me. The revised release:

Are you past your "sell-by" date?
Will you soon be called the late—?
Do your candles and your weight
Coincide?

And I've added an interpolation to the ending to make a virtue of necessity:

Why should your satellite dish? (spoken: Wait for it—!)
We'll say you're thirty-nine . . . ish.

Lyric © 2007 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

Per Aspera ad Astra

(I hope I've got that right.) For Walter M. Schirra, Jr., has gone to his reward.

I marked the occasion of his 1962 flight with my very first verse, the refrain of which was:

Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!
Hurrah for Wally Schirra!

It went on to say that he landed in the Pacific, and his aim was terrific (and so it was, according to the news reports; even now, the obit called it a "perfect splashdown"), and that he was rescued by the Kearsarge (the third of that ilk), which is a ship that's very large; but these are side issues that need not detain us. (The entire work, which may have run to all of eight lines apart from the refrain, was printed in a parent-teacher bulletin of some sort. I was no end chuffed.)

The point is, that I've never known 45 years to pass so quickly.