Subject: Vera Lynn tops the charts again -- at 92
From:
Desert Dancer
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 01:58 PM
From the New York Times:
Letter From Britain Relishing a Sweet Taste of Nostalgia
By ALAN COWELL
Published: September 18, 2009
excerpted:
LONDON — Every so often, Britons like to measure their present against a past that time has in some ways overtaken — doughty, imperial, island folk with a reach far beyond their shores, suffused with a backs-to-the-wall fighting spirit, conjuring victory against the odds.
...
But of all those moments, none seems quite so determinedly quirky, and yet so perversely predictable, as the ascent this week to the top of the British music charts of a collection of songs by Vera Lynn, at 92 the oldest person to attain that artistic peak — songs that first became popular in World War II, known probably as much to American service personnel based in Britain at that time as to the British themselves.
Vera Lynn was known as "the forces' sweetheart," the lyrics and lilt of her music resonating as much with the troops on far-flung battlefields as with those left behind to work on farms and in munitions factories, facing the harsh austerity and perils of war — in the parlance of the era, keeping the homes fires burning.
Best-known among Vera Lynn's songs were "We'll Meet Again" and "The White Cliffs of Dover," offering a reminder that, in war, it is not only the troops in battle who shoulder the burden, ears ringing with the blast of roadside bombs or the enormous, intimate rattle of automatic fire.
...
Vera Lynn last topped the charts in 1952 in the aftermath of those same austere days.
"Our boys are away again," she said this week to explain her success, "and the music is significant again. And it's a bit of nostalgia, too."
Others have drawn similar conclusions.
"Lovely tunes have been out of favor for some time," the columnist Michele Hanson wrote in The Guardian. "It's been all screeching, thumping, rapping, crashing rage and multi-decibels, but not much melody and modulation, so perhaps we need a bit of a change."
---
I have to say that the the columnist's generalization seems a bit out of touch, to me, and I'm not all that in touch with contemporary myself... but, excepting that, the achievement is still an interesting phenomenon.
~ Becky in Tucson
|
sj
