[Video: unsurprisingly, YouTube’s got many videos set to this song — even to this exact version. I’m not sure why the person who posted this one decided to illustrate it with a black-and-white montage of Hollywood actresses, not all of them contemporaneous with the recording; I assume the idea was to present them strung together, like a metaphorical… well, you get the idea. For more on the song, though, see the note at the foot of this post.]

A few days ago, the always reliable whiskey river floated this poem ([source]) from Czeslaw Milosz our way:

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

Diane Ackerman ([source]) muses on moments like Milosz’s, thus:

The brain is a gifted illusionist. Here’s one of its best tricks: I seem to perceive the winter woods today in lavish detail, because whatever I pay attention to looms, furiously present, and saturates my awareness. An ice storm has turned a Japanese maple into a glass figurine. As I caress it with my eyes, the rest of the scene blurs, unless I shift my focus to something else, when that leaps into view—a female cardinal with taupe breast feathers and beak orange as candy corn sitting atop a starry fence. I don’t feel like I’m looking through a periscope, but glancing outside at nature in the round. A subtle sense of all that’s lurking in the rest of the scene lulls me into thinking I’m seeing the yard in a single eye-gulp.

That “single eye-gulp” may not entirely, or even remotely fairly represent the world actually seen. It does, though, speak to the heart as much as — more than — all the details considered serially.

About “A String of Pearls”:

The best single source of information about the 1941 song I found while preparing today’s post is an informal research report (from 2017) by one Dennis M. Spragg. Among much else about the composer, Glenn Miller, the song’s chart history, and so on, it provided me with the photo at right. (I found it nowhere else.)

In many ways the song is unremarkable; as one source said, it’s effectively a melody without a melody… which is nonetheless instantly recognizable. The Miller orchestra’s original arrangement, however, does include one (heh) pearl of genius: the cornet solo, a bit more than thirty seconds long, plopped into the middle.

That solo was the work of Bobby Hackett, a talented multi-instrumentalist (guitar, cornet, etc.), who’d joined Miller’s Big Band a few months before they recorded the song. When he was let loose in November 1941 to improvise in “A String of Pearls,” Miller reportedly so appreciated the result that he asked Hackett if he could play it again, exactly that way, in all future performances and recordings; Hackett replied something like, “Uh, yeah, I think so…” Thus do inspired, one-of-a-kind phenomena become note-for-note rote icons!

One more note: until reading up about the song over the last few days, I didn’t know that it had ever had lyrics — was, y’know, actually singable. A bit forced, maybe, given the music’s relentless dah, dah, DAH-dah-dah rhythm, but the lyricist did what he could with it. Here are the first couple of verses:

Ba-by, here’s a five-and-dime
Ba-by, now’s about the time
For a string of pearls à la Woolworth

Every pearl’s a star above
Wrapped in dreams, and filled with love
That old string of pearls à la Woolworth

The rational, word-parsing mind (mine, anyhow) resists lyrics which hammer at it, especially with a dumb claim like “These pearls from an old discount chain store are magical and quite valuable.” It doesn’t help when said lyrics cram the claim into a narrow meter, syllables bulging through he seams. Oddly, though, once I slowed down and drew a breath — temporarily pulling back from tongue-clucking semantic aggression — the words seemed shaped for today’s theme after all. On balance, I’m happy to have met them.

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