I guess it happens to all of us. You’re asleep, deep in a peaceful dream, when you hear the music. You start humming and can’t stop as the words rearrange themselves. You’re half awake as the song continues on a loop.
See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle
Just remember darling, all the while
You belong to me.
Images form in my subconscious. It’s the 50’s again and Jo Stafford is singing.
See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember, darling, when a dream appears
You belong to me.
I’m listening to WNEW-AM, Frank Sinatra’s favorite radio station in New York City. They play all the great standards from the 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s. It’s “The Make Believe Ballroom with Martin Bloch”. I turn up the volume a bit as Jo Stafford continues.
I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too, and blue
I see grainy black and white images of Snookie Lanson and Dorothy Collins — a folksy duet — on “Your Hits Of The Week.” It’s the show that followed Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” 10:3o, Saturday night on WNBC-TV, channel 4 in New York.
That was one of our two “stay up late nights” during those long ago years. Snooky Lanson, Dorothy Collins, Giselle MacKenzie and Russell Arms sang the top “tin pan alley” hits of the week in countdown fashion. In-between, there would be a “Lucky Strike extra,” an unknown song being promoted by the sponsor, Lucky Strike Cigarettes. The “Hits of the Week” singers were nice, but merely pale imitations of the star vocalists of the day. Jo Stafford, Teresa Brewer, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Guy Mitchell, Doris Day, Sinatra, and so on. When Elvis hit the scene, the “Hits” cast looked downright foolish trying to warble songs like “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock.”
But I digress. Jo Stafford is still singing in my head.
Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember, till you’re home again
Or I come to you
You belong to me!
I can’t shake the song. Jo Stafford sings louder and louder til I finally awake. I stumble out to the kitchen where our scrappy Scotties, Bonnie and Gibbs, are barking for breakfast biscuits.
I belong to them.
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