One of the group raised a hand to ask a question. “Have any of you heard the new music for the show about Annie Oakley? Jerome Kern is writing the score. I think they’re going to call the production Annie Get Your Gun.”
“If Kern wrote the music,” a voice near the piano says, “it probably sounds something like this.”
At this point, the speaker, Jule Styne, of Frank Sinatra’s songwriting team of Sammy Cahn (lyrics) and Jule Styne (music), moves to the piano and begins playing a tune.
Of course, Styne made up the whole thing. He knew nothing of the Annie Oakley show and he had never heard the new music, but Styne knew Kern’s work and Styne liked to improvise. Styne was a musical prodigy. He couldn’t help himself. So, he made up a tune and everyone liked it, even young Frankie over there in the corner.
Later, after being admonished by Cahn for brazen balderdashery and musical masqueradery, Styne humbly asked the lyricist to provide the words for the song. Cahn did, Styne fine-tuned the tune and Sinatra recorded the song on October 26, 1946.
It was an instant hit and went to #16 on the charts.
At the opening of Sinatra’s new movie, It happened in Brooklyn, the next year on April 7, 1947, the song was included. In fact, Sinatra’s character takes credit for writing the song, which is sung by Kathryn Grayson as she smiles sweetly at Peter Lawford, the shy young Englishman who would later make Kathryn’s character a duchess.
A very timely piece and well received at that.
Here a few of the lyrics:
Time after time
I tell myself that I’m
So lucky to be loving you
I only know what I know
The passing years will show
You’ve kept my love so young, so new
And time after time
You’ll hear me say that I’m
So lucky to be loving you
Not bad for a prodigy show-off ripping off someone else’s music they didn’t even write.
But, stop. Is this just of a bit schmaltzy feel-good music? Or, is it something else? Is it physics? Is this the long-sought secret of the mystery of time?
Great scientists have struggled for all time to understand time, and they, from a science standpoint, continue to miss the beat. They just can’t find the tune. Let’s see if Styne did.
The words “time”, “I” and “you” suggest a personal relationship with time, not a distant and cold imagining of equations. Relationship. Companionship. You, I and time.
“Time after time” and “passing” show time moving in a line. Amazingly, in that passing, the words “young” and “new” appear, where old and tired would seem more appropriate from our high school science lab experience. Have the eggheads in the backroom got it wrong? Is time a relationship that grows young and new, not old and stale, as we move forward in time?
Then, in the final line, we have the zinger, the simple phrase “loving you.” That’s the luck, the good fortune of time.
What on earth have Styne and Cahn done with this song?
Do you see it?
The keys word linkages: “I-you,” “young-new” and “love-you”?
The secret of time, of understanding and enjoying one of the greatest secrets in the universe, is a companion in time, a relationship. Not just I or you, but an I-you. That changes time to young-new, because the secret is love-you.
A companion in time is the secret of time.
Someone for each next step.
Until the end.
Of time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSGWsIQJdh8