Night Tunes

Dr. X posts this from a Bogart movie:

Damn, Year of the Cat sounds a lot better than I thought it would after 30 years.  Allmusic notes that Stewart's success was "very strange when one considers how far removed from the dominant late-'70s sounds of punk, disco, and new wave [his] music was." Yeah, now that you mention it...

Stewart lives in Marin County now.

As every schoolchild knows, Stewart got his start in the big skiffle craze, which was led by Lonnie Donegan, also known as The King of Skiffle.  Apart from his musicological significance, Lonnie Donegan is the hero to little boys everywhere because of this fine tune.  It's an older tune than you might think.

Ah, the power of music - it can transport us into the past, where people were very, very silly.


[Update: here's a 1981 interview with the wife of the composer, who was still getting checks from the song.

"You should see the royalties.  In Sweden, Holland, Germany, Japan...they loved that song."  (Her husband had passed just a month earlier.)  "You know, Ernie wrote beautiful ballads, too.  I don't know why they weren't successful.  He wrote Continental Nights, which bandleader Paul Whiteman used as his theme song.  I wish Ernie was here to play it," she says with her voice breaking.  "I'm always looking over to his bed.  You still do that," she says with a sad smile.


Something in my eye... ]