“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
May 3, 2016
ALAN writes:
Do certain songs linger in the recesses of your memory and reassert themselves into your awareness from time to time? They do for me. Here is an example:
On some mornings in 2009, I would sit by my open window reading or writing and overhearing the happy sounds of children at play in the spacious backyard of a home nearby.
There were eight children, siblings and friends, ranging in age from infancy to about ten, and they were engaged in the innocent childhood joys of swinging, sliding, running, and laughing. Watching them at play reminded me of my own boyhood. I saw myself in one of the little boys. And the thought occurred to me of how fast my transition from infant to energetic little boy must have seemed to my mother. “Enjoy them when they’re young, because they grow up so fast,” are words I recalled hearing during my boyhood years but not fully understanding.
By 2009, I understood them perfectly. The brevity and swiftness of life had become all too clear to me by then, and they were highlighted one day when I listened to the song “Sunrise, Sunset.” I never saw the play for which it was written (“Fiddler on the Roof”) or the movie version. But the song seemed to me to possess considerable merit and beauty. Now I could understand and appreciate the lyrics far better than I did or could when I first heard that song in 1966.
That happened via the magic of radio. I missed the Golden Age of Radio. But I did not miss John McCormick.
The Beatles performed in St. Louis in the summer of 1966, but I did not go to see them. I was beginning to appreciate things more refined than rock “music.” And I discovered one of them at midnight.
For thirty years, John McCormick had a midnight-to-dawn program on KMOX Radio in St. Louis. He was “The Man Who Walks and Talks at Midnight.” He was an old-school radio broadcaster and the best I ever heard. His program could be heard throughout the Midwest and he was highly respected by other old-school radio broadcasters.
John McCormick
One evening in 1991, I received a long-distance phone call. To my astonishment and pleasant surprise, it was veteran Chicago radio broadcaster Mike Rapchak calling from his home in Whiting, Indiana, to thank me for a letter I had sent him expressing my gratitude for his weekend midnight-to-dawn program “Great Music from Chicago” on WGN Radio. He was a radio legend in Chicago. When asked to play rock “music” on his program in 1965, he had such a low opinion of that “music” that he tore up the Top 40 survey, said “I’m no longer playing this junk,” and walked out during the program. He remained forever in love with romantic music from the World War II years and the lonesome sound of train whistles in the night.
How uncommonly thoughtful it was for a veteran radio announcer, then 71, to make a long-distance phone call to one of his listeners whom he did not know and who was 29 years his junior, merely to say thank you for a simple letter of appreciation.
Just before concluding our conversation, Mr. Rapchak said to me, “Say hello to John McCormick if you happen to meet him at a gas station.” It was an acknowledgement by a superlative radio veteran in Chicago of another in St. Louis. Such men set a gold standard in radio broadcasting.
I never heard a single four-letter word on their all-night programs. Nor was there any cutesy-poo “happy talk”. What I heard were voices of restraint and understatement, of the dignity and gravitas that were once common among American white men. Good English and good taste in music were part of their character and their programs. The records they played were classical music or music from the vast catalog of American popular song and musical theater. They knew how to play music perfectly suited for late night, songs like “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Peggy Lee and “Once in a While” by Nancy Ames.
John McCormick had been a pilot during World War II. He maintained an interest in aviation and had great respect for American astronauts. I recall hearing him read news reports about Project Gemini and Apollo spaceflights in the years 1966-’69.
There was nothing loud, feverish, juvenile, or trendy in his program or in his manner. There was no rock music or jazz. It was a program for grown-ups. I was not a grown-up in 1966, but his perfect diction, smooth voice, and low-key manner, all set in the darkness and quiet and solitude of late night, held a magical appeal for me, proving what a misfit I was among 16-year-old American boys. I became a regular listener and spoke with Mr. McCormick by phone a few times to express my appreciation for his work.
Every so often he would reminisce about people he had met or known or worked with years earlier in Chicago or California, always concluding his memory with the words “Other days and other ways…..” Every December he would read a traditional Christmas story. Snowflakes, he said, were “the feathers of the angels”. Just before each nightly program ended, he would play a recording of “The Lord’s Prayer” by Perry Como. He concluded his program with the words, “And now the night has separated from the day.” I recall hearing him say those words on so many mornings when the only other sound was the chirping of birds in the hour before dawn.
At 4:30 every morning, he reported the temperature and weather conditions in cities around the nation and the world, including “the Eternal City of Rome, the City of Light,” and “Hong Kong, the land of too, too many tailors.” On many mornings I lay there in my bed with my radio tuned at low volume and the darkness and mystery of a summer night just beyond my screen door, pictures taking form in my imagination at the sound of John McCormick’s elegant voice reciting those magical words.
Once every week he would play the entire soundtrack album from a Broadway play or Hollywood musical film, and between the songs he would narrate the story. Hearing such music on radio, as I did that year, without ever having seen the play or the movie enhanced the imagination. That was how the melodies and words of songs from certain plays insinuated themselves into my awareness, and then into my memory. “Sunrise, Sunset” was one of those songs. And so it is that now, fifty years later, a single line from that song – “Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, blossoming even as we gaze” – reminds me instantly of hearing those very words in the wee small hours of the morning on John McCormick’s radio program in 1966, long before I could understand them fully.
The version of that song that I like best is by Robert Goulet, because of its excellent arrangement and proper cadence, the orchestra behind his voice, and his expert handling of the lyric. It is just four minutes of reflection and sentiment, but at once hauntingly beautiful and bittersweet.
It is hard to believe the extent to which Americans immerse themselves in such busyness, flitting about here and there in pursuit of one diversion and distraction after another, made worse by the mindless tempo of modern life and the excess of “things” around them, that they lose awareness of the most important elements of life.
“Sunrise, Sunset” is likely best understood and appreciated by parents, but the lyric and sentiment may be just as significant to people who have no children. In my case, when listening one evening to that song, I happened to glance across the room to a framed photograph taken by my mother and showing a dear friend of ours and her two children, a girl and a boy, standing in our back yard on Easter Sunday 1965.
“Is this the little girl I carried?”, Robert Goulet sings. And yes, I respond silently, as I gaze at the little girl in that picture: I carried her when she was 2-3 years old. And now she is a middle-aged woman.
“Is this the little boy at play?”, Robert Goulet sings. And yes, I respond silently, as I gaze at the little boy in that picture: I carried him and played with him when he was 1-2 years old. And now he is a middle-aged man.
Their mother is gone, my mother is gone, Robert Goulet is gone, and Mike Rapchak is gone. John McCormick died more than twenty years ago. His voice in the night had been a kind of companion to me for nearly half my life. I cannot imagine that a man of his caliber and character would have the least respect for the hype, speed, gimmicks, and sensationalism of American radio programming today.
People who remember those years have said that his all-night programs were treasures—my sentiment precisely. In a reminiscence of all-night radio, one man in St. Louis wrote in 2010: “I constantly traded duties with anyone on the police force in order to stay with the night shift—to patrol the quiet streets with John McCormick on my radio. He kept me entertained—yes—but also kept me alert to my duties and awake to the pulse of the world.”
The song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was recorded by Blue Barron and his orchestra in Chicago in 1949, with John McCormick doing the recitation midway through the song. It was the record he played at the beginning of his nightly program. My reply to that question: Yes, I am lonesome tonight…..for those people, those years, and the serene sound of John McCormick’s voice on late-night radio.
— Comments —
Mark Jaws writes:
What a great entry by Alan. It was so good that I read it twice.
