an old-fashioned love song
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It isn't an I’m-so-happy-I-could-die love song; it isn't teen infatuation (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or tormented torch. It's a mellow, wistful, grow-old-with-me declaration, rendered in the tenderest manner. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote it in 1937; some of the usual suspects (Torme, Crosby, Grappelli, Hartman, Krall, Simone) have had a go at it. Here's Miss Peggy Lee, for whom it was said to be a favorite. She leaves out in the introductory verse, which goes thusly: Many men with lofty aims,Strive for lofty goals,Others play at smaller games,Being simpler souls.I am of the latter brand;All I want to do,Is to find a spot of land,And live there with you.She also made one interesting change, substituting "Baby and Joan" for "Darby and Joan," probably figuring (correctly) that most people wouIdn’t get the reference. I know I didn't at first, and now I am quite fond of it. "Darby and Joan," it turns out, is a term-- probably better know to our Brit friends (and Lee's recording, as it happens, was more popular in the U.K.)-- that means “a happily married couple who lead a placid, uneventful life” or "a symbol of a happy couple in advancing age." D & B were the subjects of a few poems by different poets in the 1700s and 1800s, and are alluded to in a few novels (Thackeray, Rendell, Henry James) as well. And if you’re my mate and me, watching the Brit sitcom As Time Goes By on a Saturday night as he does the puzzle and I read the book review, "that same old view" seems the perfect thing to aspire to.
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