“I will Survive,” Gloria Gaynor- Awe, c’mon, how can it be bad when the musical refrain is very much in the mode of Bach…(that is what happens when you have a musician/music nut for a son)…
As far as “Cat’s in the Cradle”, I don’t find that irritating and annoying and I liked Harry Chapin. Maybe it is getting on in years, maybe it is realizing the cost of working the jobs I have, but when I listen to “Cat’s in the Crade” I tend to tear up, because those words rang true with a lot of people…though I don’t think I’ll have that kind of relationship with my son, but I already see how much his own world is going to take him from mine:)
Tearing up: One of the song I used to sing to my children to get them to sleep was Malvina Reynolds’ “Turn Around.” (“Where are you going, my little one, little one / Where are you going, my baby my own? . . . “) I have sung that song hundreds of times, literally, and I doubt I have gotten through five of them without choking up and getting watery around the eyes. (” . . . Turn around and you’re tiny, turn around and you’re grown / Turn around and you’re a woman with babes of her own.”)
Harry Chapin! Never cared for him either, although I had friends who hailed him as a musical genius. Most of his songs were just too raw for me, and he wasn’t any great shakes in the vocal department either.
Billie Holiday didn’t write Strange Fruit (although at some point she said she did). It was written by Abel Meeropol under his pen name Lewis Alan. He’s also the guy who adopted the orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
