Friday, June 12, 2009

Slaying At Webster Hall: 1911


Ah, sometimes those dances get those passions stirring, except Home Sweet Home??
Lupo should have had Lucky Luciano around. Lucky lived nearby at 265 East 10th Street. My mother used to go to Webster Hall with my grandmother in the 1920's.
About Home Sweet Home, you can hear it here
"Home! Sweet Home!" (also known as "Home, Sweet Home") is a song that has remained well-known for over 150 years. Adapted from American actor and dramatist John Howard Payne's 1823 opera Clari, Maid of Milan, the song's melody was composed by Englishman Sir Henry Bishop with lyrics by John Howard Payne. The opening lines
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
have become famous. It is also used with Sir Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs and in Alexandre Guilmant's Fantasy for organ Op. 43, the Fantaisie sur deux mélodies anglaises, both of which also use "Rule, Britannia".
More recently, in 1909, it was featured as being played in the silent film The House of Cards by Thomas A. Edison. In the particular scene, a frontier bar was hurriedly closed due to a fracas. A card reading "Play Home Sweet Home" was displayed, upon which an on-screen fiddler promptly supplied a pantomime of the song. This may imply a popular association of this song with the closing hour of drinking establishments.
This song is famous in Japan as "Hanyū no Yado" ("埴生の宿"?) ("A Lodging"). It has been used in such movies as The Burmese Harp and Grave of the Fireflies. It is also used at Senri-Chuo Station on the Kita-Osaka Kyuko Railway.
Key phrases from the song have been a cultural staple for several generations.
* The song was very popular with troops on both sides of the American Civil War.
* It was a particular favorite of President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, who requested it in an 1862 performance at the White House by opera singer Adelina Patti.
* Needlework portraits of a house with the phrase "Home Sweet Home" have long been an icon.
* The song's melody played in the underscore as Dorothy spoke of "No Place Like Home" near the end of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
* Tom Lehrer's satire of the old southern United States finished with the line, "Be it ever so decadent, there's no place like home."
* The song is featured in the film Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), when Jonathon first speaks with his Aunts.
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble there's no place like home!
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere:
Chorus:
Home! Home! sweet, sweet Home!
|: There's no place like Home! :|
2. I gaze on the moon as I tread the drear wild
And feel that my mother now thinks of her child
As she looks on the moon from our own cottage door
Through the woodbine whose fragrance shall cheer me no more.
3. An exile from home splendor dazzles in vain
Oh, give me my low, thatched cottage again,
The birds singing gaily that come at my call,
Give me them with that peace of mind, dearer than all.
Chorus:
4. How sweet 'tis to sit neath a fond father's smile,
And the cares of a mother to soothe and beguile.
Let others delight 'mid new pleasures to roam,
But give me, oh give me the pleasures of home.
Chorus:
5. To thee I'll return overburdened with care,
The hearts dearest solace will smile on me there
No more from that cottage again will I roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
Chorus:
Chorus:

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