“Beautiful People” a lovely tune by Melanie Safka employs a really interesting chord change. Centered in A, it moves to C# as the root, which is the 3rd for A. This is probably much more common than I think, but it just caught me how perfect the chord change is as it relates to the cadence of the lyrics. Pretty Cool.
Lyrics, chords here.
Santarantula, Santarantula, it’s spidey tinsel-time! Here’s a, well, a sort of Christmas song you probably haven’t heard of: Santarantula!
Santarantula, Santarantula
When you crawl back to the north hole
With an empty sack slung across you back
Won’t you stop and have.. Another snack
Another year come and gone we fear
And this one was a doozy
But your gentle bite brings us joy this night
though your venom makes us woozy…
Woo-ooooo-oooo-zy!
And I Love Her, a beautiful Lennon/McCartney tune. Here are tabs, lyrics, notation and chord diagrams for this first part. You might notice that some chords you already know in one position are played in another spot, and this is so we can take advantage of moving the chord shape to get the proper voicing.
Another great American songbook tune: “I’ve Got The World on a String”. World on a String is a 1932 popular jazz song composed by Harold Arlen, with lyrics written by Ted Koehler. It was written for the twenty-first edition of the Cotton Club series which opened on October 23, 1932, the first of the Cotton Club Parades.
The song was recorded and popularized by Cab Calloway who had a #18 hit in 1932.
Bing Crosby recorded the song on January 26, 1933, with the Dorsey Brothers and their Orchestra.
The song was one of the first recorded by Frank Sinatra when he transferred to Capitol Records in 1953. His recording on April 30, 1953, with an orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle reached #14 on Billboard’s most played list.
“That Old Black Magic” is a 1942 popular song written by Harold Arlen (music), with the lyrics by Johnny Mercer. They wrote it for the 1942 film Star Spangled Rhythm, when it was sung by Johnny Johnston and danced by Vera Zorina. The song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1943 but lost out to “You’ll Never Know”.
The song was published in 1942 and has become an often-recorded standard, with versions that include the original single release by Glenn Miller, by the singers Margaret Whiting, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Mercer himself, and others. Mercer wrote the lyrics with Judy Garland in mind. Garland recorded the song for Decca Records in 1942. Mercer recalled wanting to write a song about magic, and while composing, asking Arlen to write more music so the song could go on longer, but that they still wrote the whole song in about three hours. Billy Daniels recorded the song in 1949 and it became his trademark recording.
Travel guitars are pretty interesting, and if you travel and can’t bring your guitar with, there are a few “travel guitar’ solutions. Typically these shorter-scale guitars have a neck without a headstock, the tuners being built into the butt of the guitar. The guitars are meant to be played through headphones and although they may be suitable for performance, I suspect they are used mostly for just what the name implies, a substitute instrument you can use to practice while away from home. Some of them do sound pretty good though, judging by recorded travel guitar video on their various websites.
“day and night, I wanna do right but the monkey gets in the way”…
I’ve been playing this on solo guitar, adding to my Christmas repertoire a little this year. I downloaded a nice drum track from wikiloops.com where you can get some really great (and free) tracks to experiment with.
In Logic Pro the guitar track went down over the drums and then the bass (which Art Baguer said is “stylistically on point” and so I am inordinately proud of that for sure)!
I should have the changes up here shortly as a pdf download for any folks who are interested. Enjoy!
