I just listened to Jimmy Dale Gilmore's version of I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. I thought that is so perfect that nobody ever had to record it again. Mack the Knife has probably been done by hundreds of singers. Originally written in German, Macheath has been around a while, from The Beggars Opera to The Three Penny Opera, then on to Bobby Darwin and that awful Louis Armstrong version. There is a tendency to do it finger-popping ala Bobby Darin. His is a really strange juxtaposition of style versus lyrics. Jimmy Dale didn't do that. He drags it. Now we have his dark, haunting version from the French crime film Un Prophete. One more song that doesn't need to be re-recorded. Finally after 90 years, perfection.
5 comments:
Being a So Cali and slumming in Palm Springs every so often, Bobby's is our Fav. Remindes me of the Rat Pack.
JG
Some things are a matter of taste or style. In this case, you are simply wrong.
Liked this arrangement, but still think the German version is more unsettling; I find it kind of sardonic in tone.
I'm with you on Darin.
Haunting version! It reminds me of the somber day in 1964, my (our) first year of college, when, after playing my Threepenny Opera soundtrack over and over and over, I learned that Marc Blitzstein, who did the translation and Broadway adaptation, had been beaten to death by sailors in the Caribbean. Life does imitate art.
wow. Jimmy Dale continues his penetrating eeriness. For real.
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