I recorded this sweet song as part on an hour-long program of music written for — or strongly identified with — Judy Garland.
It was written by Burton Lane and Ralph Freed for her and Mickey Rooney to perform in the 1941 MGM movie BABES ON BROADWAY.
I learned from Wikipedia that the lyricist, Ralph Freed, was the baby brother of producer/lyricist Arthur Freed, who co-wrote the song “This Heart Of Mine” which I featured in a recent blog post,
Having spent a fair amount of time — especially during the summer — in Manhattan as a child and teenager, I savor all of the geographical references in the lyrics.
I only wish they had mentioned Chock Full o’ Nuts, my favorite place to get a burger (with ketchup, mustard and relish) plus a big orange drink — which was a mixture of orange juice, sugar and water, I think, churning endlessly in a big, glass dispenser until it was sold to thirsty customers.
Chock Full o’ Nuts started during the roaring ’20s as a chain of — no surprise — nut shops.
But when the Depression hit, the owner William Black pivoted and turned his stores into lunch counters where — according to Wikipedia — one could buy a cup of coffee and a cream-cheese-with-chopped-nuts sandwich for five cents.
Jackie Robinson with a fellow Chock Full o’ Nuts employee
And his coffee proved to be so popular that he started selling it for people to make at home or in their office.
William Black — whose last name was originally Schwartz (which means black in Yiddish) — seems to have been a somewhat progressive employer.
Most of his company’s cooks and waitstaff were African-American, and when baseball superstar Jackie Robinson retired from playing, he became a vice president and director of personnel at Chock Full o’ Nuts.
Mr. Black was married to two female singers (not at the same time…) who performed his company’s radio and TV jingles. His second wife also became very involved with their family’s philanthropic efforts.
They gave millions of dollars to medical research and helped to start the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.
And there is even a William Black medical research building at Columbia University’s medical center (Mr. Black was a Columbia alum…)
But back to “How About You?”.
Burton Lane
Burton Lane was a very successful composer — originally from Manhattan — who worked at various movie studios in California.
Interspersed with his time in Hollywood, he co-wrote songs for Broadway shows including FINIAN’S RAINBOW (with Yip Harberg) and ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (with Alan Jay Lerner).
He is also one of several people who claim credit for bringing Judy Garland to the attention of the powers-that-be at MGM after he saw her perform with her two older sisters at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles.
So not only do we have Mr. Lane to thank for the great songs he co-wrote, we also can (at least partially) thank him for helping to bring Judy Garland and her extraordinary gifts as a performer to a much wider audience.
I would also like to thank Doug Hammer for his playful piano impulses and painstaking production skills as well as Stephen C. Fischer for his patient and collaborative graphic design work.
If you’d like to stream our version of “How About You?” you can click here.
Every stream, every “like,” and every “save” encourages the mysterious algorithms of the digital music platforms to share a recording with other potential listeners.
Here’s the graphic for “How About You?” which features what was probably my last professional headshot as a teen performer in NYC.
One final note…
As I was drafting this blog post, the New York Knicks were engaged in an extraordinary series of basketball games which culminated in them becoming NBA champions.
I especially like New York in June when the Knicks win the NBA playoffs after a 53 year drought!
How about you?
Although I am not a big basketball fan, I became swept up in the drama and virtuosity of the NBA playoffs.
Twice I went to bed early — thinking the Knicks had lost — and awoke to discover that they had triumphed.
Wow!
Oh, me of little faith…
Since their victory, I have been savoring the enthusiasm of the Knicks’ fans — in NYC and around the country.
Jalen Brunson
And I love what one of their star players Jalen Brunson said following their record-breaking comeback from 29 points down to win game four.
“You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario, but you gotta go out there and do something about it.”
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
Those are great words to live by…
Thank you, Knicks, for bringing millions of us — from many different political and cultural and ethnic backgrounds — together during this challenging time here on planet earth.
You gave — and continue to give — us hope and joy and inspiration.
And THANK YOU to everyone who is willing to read and listen to yet another one of my blog posts.
Spring has finally arrived — in fits and starts — here in the northeast United States.
And we have two days of (much-needed) rain forecast to start later this morning!
I’ve been sitting on this blog post for weeks because I want my posts to be uplifting.
Yet so much of what is happening here on planet earth continues to be the opposite.
I find myself returning to recent elections in Hungary for hope.
If I understand correctly, Hungarians had a president/dictator for 16 years who did his best to hamstring/contaminate/eliminate their democratic institutions such as freedom of the press and judicial independence.
And yet, after MUCH courageous struggle, their president/dictator was defeated in April with a record 80% voter turnout.
Hurrah!
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I wrote the song included at the beginning of this blog post several years ago.
One of my favorite signs of spring is the hopeful sound of horny. peeper frogs who are looking for a mate and establishing their personal breeding territories.
In fact, I like this sound so much that I included it at the beginning and ending of “Boil A Frog Slowly.”
As readers of my blog are well aware, one of my main musical allies is pianist/composer/producer Doug Hammer, who lives with his beautiful French artist/graphic designer wife in a ranch-style dwelling on a suburban street in a city north of Boston.
Hidden in his basement is a recording studio with an impeccably maintained Schimmel grand piano and all sorts of recording equipment which Doug is constantly upgrading and updating, bless him.
And hidden behind his house is a little wetland which still manages to exist even though is has been surrounded by houses over the past few decades.
In the spring, melting snow and falling rain fill up the wetlands so that geese, ducks — including two wood ducks this year! —and other water-loving animals can do their thing.
And at a certain point, the peepers emerge from the earth/mud and start peeping!
It is such a lively sound — kind of like the aural equivalent of fireflies blinking on a summer night…
I spent a week in upstate NY last month, and most evenings I went for a long walk on country roads wearing a safety vest with ever-changing, multi-colored lights on it.
Whenever I passed a damp area — a pond or a stream or a drainage ditch — the sound of peepers filled the night air!
Somehow they manage to survive a changing mix of sun, rain, snow and hail with temperatures fluctuating from the 20s (overnight) to the 60s (during the day).
Peepers “prefer permanent ponds due to (their) advantage in avoiding predation; however, (they are) very adaptable with respect to the habitat (they) can live in.”
I was happy to read that they are not currently considered to be an endangered species — perhaps due in part to their adaptable natures (mentioned above).
I also learned that “in northern regions, the frog is able to endure below freezing temperatures due to the capacity of its liver to exude and flush the bloodstream with a glucose cryoprotectant which acts both as an anti-freeze in its blood, and allows organs like the heart to enter into a state of protected dormancy.”
Wow!
That certainly helps to explain their resiliency during our weather/temperature swings.
Wikipedia continues: “The peeper earns its name from its chirping call, which marks the beginning of spring.”
And its formal name, Pseudacris crucifer, “is derived from the Latin root meaning “cross-bearing”— a reference to the cross-like pattern on the spring peeper’s (back).”
Their “chirping calls are significant for communication…as females choose their mates based on the frequency and volume associated with them.”
Yes, indeed… the passionate songs of spring.
Chirp, peepers, chirp!
I released “Boil A Frog Slowly” two springs ago, and I have been collecting information since then about how out of balance, out of touch, and out of control our billionaire class —what some are now calling “The Epstein Class”— has become.
For example, the Americans For Tax Fairness Action Fund recently reminded me that:
“The United States was founded on a rejection of monarchy ie: no tiny elite ruling over everyone else. However, our current president “has embraced a governing philosophy that rewards extreme wealth and concentrates power in the hands of the richest people in the country: America’s roughly 1,000 billionaires” — which includes himself as well as many of his friends and family members.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
This statistic is particularly shocking to me: “During (our current president’s) first year back in office, U.S. billionaires increased their wealth by an astonishing $1.5 trillion, pushing their combined fortunes to more than $8.2 trillion.“
As I am sure most of us are well aware, billionaires and giant corporations hold enormous influence over our economy AND over our political system…
It was this emerging realization which inspired me to write this song.
But now as I listen to it, I am also reminded about our ongoing climate challenges which our current president plus all of the greedy and cowardly media/entertainment conglomerates (which continue to provide an awful ot of people with theira daily dose of “news”) are now downplaying and/or ignoring even more than in recent years.
Recently I watched a weather report on the CBS morning news/entertainment show.
As part of their reporting of record-breaking levels of heat in the west and southwest of the USA, there was NO mention of steps each and every one of us could take to decrease our carbon footprints.
Instead there were many segments on things to buy, places to fly (the most carbon-intensive way to travel) and ways to continue to consume more than our fair share of the natural resources on this amazing little planet which we all call home.
The message seemed to be “Keep living your consumerist lives exactly as you have been doing for the past few generations” — which, of course, is how we have ended up in our current terrifying environmental disaster situation.
Yet another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
But back to the billionaires…
As I wrote above, I do not want my blog posts to increase anyone’s daily burden of hopelessness.
So I will end with two bits of positive news.
In 2022 Massachusetts voters — of which I was one — approved a “millionaire’s tax,” and since then it has added more than a billion dollars per year to our state budget.
Revenue from this surtax is mandated to go toward education and transportation initiatives — including more free lunch programs, implementing “clean energy” in schools, making community college free for students 25 and older, and increasing the number of child care slots for low-income families.
And rather than decreasing the number of millionaires and billionaires wanting to live in MA — as nay-sayers and their lobbyists had warned — that number continues to rise..
Adding an extra 4% tax on annual income exceeding one million dollars CAN be accomplished!
And in New York City, newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani — along with governor Kathy Hochul — has recently proposed a pied-à-terre tax which would target luxury secondary homes worth over $5 million which are NOT primary residences.
This annual surcharge would raise $500 million annually to fund public services and bridge budget gaps.
And it would also begin to chip away at our much-lobbied tax code which currently allows super rich individuals and corporations to pay few — or no! — taxes while using all sorts of public services such as public education, drivable roads, tunnels and bridges.
Although “Boil A Frog Slowly” was written from a place of concern and despair, I do find ways to experience little patches of hope and optimism these days (such as the recent election in Hungary mentioned above).
The most recent “No Kings” day lifted my spirits and reminded me that there are millions of other human beings in the USA — and abroad — who are stepping up to help tip the balance of power/life back in a more healthy direction.
And the smaller political races around the country — in which Democratic candidates continue to over perform when compared with our most recent presidential election results — also give me hope.
People ARE daring to step up!
May each of us continue to find (and re-find) a healthy balance of active engagement — demonstrating in person, writing postcards/letters, giving money, volunteering on phone banks, etc. etc. etc. — with restful, rejuvenating, joyful activities.
And may the resiliency of the spring peepers give us hope and inspiration!
Thank you for reading this blog post.
We’ll see if I can increase the frequency — and upbeat tone — of them in the weeks/months to come.
Although I have not been very active as a writer, I DO continue to read many of my fellow bloggers’ posts.
And people continue to visit my site in increasing numbers — although my rising traffic statistics may be the result of bots having invaded WordPress?
If you have time/energy/willingness to play “Boil A Frog Slowly” on your favorite music platform — and then “like” it — that will help increase the likelihood of it being shared with new listeners by the mysterious algorithms which influence/control more and more of our online lives.
I like the idea of a day to celebrate and honor love.
This blog post features two songs written by Steve Sweeting — a jazz pianist, songwriter, teacher, and composer who currently lives in New York City.
“I Carry Your Heart” is a song he wrote while living in Shanghai, when he was commissioned by Chinese choral conductor Jie Yi to write a song — based on an American poem — for a festival in Ningbo.
Steve chose an early poem by ee cummings.
A few years later he and I recorded a non-choral version at Doug Hammer’s studio on the north shore of Boston.
I love the images in ee cummings’ poem, and I love the way that Steve set them to music.
And I love Steve.
He and I have been friends since he lived — with a Yamaha grand piano — in a studio apartment above an ice cream store in Brighton, MA.
He and his wife and two children have lived all around planet earth, but we have remained in contact.
Right now he is working on an original musical with lyricist/librettist Geoffrey Goldberg called Piece of Mind.
It is about an 80-year-old former USO dancer named Robert whose mind is failing him.
If you live in the NYC area, Steve and Geoffrey are having two staged readings — on Monday, March 5th at 6pm and on Tuesday, March 6th at 2:00 pm — at the Davenport Theatre (354 W. 45th Street @ 9th Avenue).
It is by invitation only, but you can click on this Piece of Mind link to find out how to be invited…
The second song — “What Am I Doing Alone?” — was inspired by a phone conversation that Steve’s wife once had with a friend.
When Steve’s wife told him about this conversation, he took notes and then wrote a song inspired by her conversation.
And it took him about an hour!
These two songs represent a yin and a yang perspective on love.
Valentine’s Day is much more pleasant to celebrate when one has a beloved person with whom to share the festivities and hoopla.
And Valentine’s Day can feel rather raw and lonely if one does not have a special someone in one’s life…
I love the story that unfolds in this song.
And the sense of longing and hoping that Steve captured in the music…
And I love Steve.
amusicalifeonplanetearth 