Recently I was thinking about that wonderful old Ahlert and Young song I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter<\/i>, and I wanted to make sure I had the lyrics right. So I did what most people do these days: I did an internet search. And I discovered, to my utter disbelief, that on the internet the lyrics did not exist.<\/p>\n
Oh sure, there’s a Wikipedia<\/i> page, where you can learn that Fats Waller had a huge hit with this song in 1935, and that since then it has been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Bing Crosby to Billy Williams (#3 on the charts) to Nat King Cole, Barry Manilow, Dean Martin, Scatman Crothers, and even Bill Haley (in a rock and roll version, of course). And if you type “I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter” into Google<\/i> – with the quotes – you get about 136000 hits. But not a single one of those pages has the actual song lyrics themselves. Not one.<\/p>\n
I was mentioning this over dinner recently to a group that consisted mainly of hip New York new media artists. They were pretty unanimous in their response of “Who cares?” Around the table there was general dismissal of my concern that great popular culture of eras past should be alive and celebrated on the internet. To me their attitude was incomprehensible. What are we here for if not to inspire those who come after, to pass the torch of what is best in our time and in times before, so that its light might illuminate the minds of the future?<\/p>\n
Yes, I know you can purchase these recordings and transcribe the words for yourself, and I’m sure there are books with the lyrics printed in them. But we think of the internet as a vast and growing reflection of our culture; yet it has these sorts of strange and inexplicable holes in it. And it seems that many of the intellectuals of this new medium simply do not care.<\/p>\n
Today I mentioned the strange absence of these song lyrics to my uncle Artie, who is in his seventies. He knew exactly what I was talking about, and seemed rather appalled that anyone would think of great song lyrics as disposable. Of course they were all right there in his head, fresh as the first day he heard them. And what did he do? He sat right down and wrote me out the lyrics:<\/p>\n
I’m gonna sit right down
\nAnd write myself a letter
\nAnd make believe it came from you
\nI’m gonna whisper words so sweet
\nGonna sweep me off my feet
\nSome kisses on the Bottom
\nI’ll be glad I got ’em
\nI’ll write and say I hope you’re feeling better
\nAnd close with love the way you do
\nI’m gonna sit right down
\nAnd write myself a letter
\nAnd make believe it came from you.
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo there you have it – now<\/i> he song is on the internet. Soon it will be up on Google<\/i>. Then I’m gonna sit right down and search there for this lyric. And make believe it came from you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently I was thinking about that wonderful old Ahlert and Young song I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter, and I wanted to make sure I had the lyrics right. So I did what most people do these days: I did an internet search. And I discovered, to my utter disbelief, that … Continue reading “Make believe it came from you”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}