best lists

Tony looks at a couple of best songs lists and finds them wanting.
James links to the new AFI best 100 movie songs quest and finds it wanting by 24 years.

As the local sport of trivia dumbs down, and of all time lists generally take 'all time' to mean the last 30 years if you're lucky, boynton was searching for a list that might take a longer view and include old songs, songs of other generations, other times. So we've spent an enjoyable time listening to a few of the 12 minute segments from the NPR The 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century"
Love this site and plan to do a song-a-day.
Poet Laureate Robert Ginsky discusses the poetry of Stardust
"even the title Stardust ... it begins and ends with the same consonant sound and that consonant cluster of S T comes back –"and love is now the stardust of yesterday...The star is when your love is new and each kiss is an inspiration” Which I think is one of the best phrases in popular music..
And after it goes away there’s a little dust left…a little glitter from what was bright…

and Peter Yarrow discussing Blowing In The Wind calls it –‘part of the secular liturgy of our times' - one of the few Protest songs that effected change?

A couple of songs that boynton likes to sing around the house are destined never to make the hipster charts but have strong claims in the popularity/most influential popular songs lists
Danny Boy -
...this very beautiful tune seems to be taking such an extraordinary hold upon the people - for hardly a week passes by without its appearing in some form or another on concert programmes....within the last few years a perfectly bewildering array of settings and arrangements has appeared.
Henry Coleman Muscial Times 1918
from The Londonderry Air: facts and fiction. Brian Audley 2002

Lorena - first heard in The Civil War TV series.
Some have even gone so far as to blame the loss of the war on Lorena. So many Southern soldiers grew homesick and deserted after singing it, that several Generals prohibited the singing of Lorena, but most soldiers sang it anyway.

See also: the BBC Radio 2 Top 100 Songs of the 20th century

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Comments: best lists

Funny how Un Bel Di never makes it onto any of these lists. Mustn't count as a song. Nor would any of Schubert's lieder I suspect.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at November 21, 2003 12:34 PM

You know I was going to go there, Gummo...

At the last minute decided not to go Elizabethan either. Where's Greensleeves!!

http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/emusic/
Posted by boynton at November 21, 2003 12:52 PM