Maggie's Farm

--heh --bless you for your close-minded open-mindedness about eclecticism in bloggery, BD.

Yep, it's a 30 year old performance from the 1981-82 TV season of "Solid Gold" --i just happened upon it, having had the other day one of those morning wake-ups with for no discernible reason a song not heard in decades running through the mind.

I didn't know it had lyrics --Mangione had released it as an instrumental lo those many years ago.

(Google may be a communist front but their Youtube reminds that even the USSR produced some great high culture)

So anyhoo, to make a short story long, i finds this performance, from the depths of that terrible recession of the first half of Reagan I when we were taking the first steps trying to repair the great peanut malaise, and was just knocked over by it --the unlikely vocal-and-brass combo, the beauty of Marilyn McCoo's voice and delivery (and physical being!), and Mangione's incredibly fine brass fills in the second chorus. The finish especially, her last note blending into the horn with so much pop music soft-power.

--had to check the two bios --she's from NJ, both parents MDs, moved to Los Angeles when she was a youngster, where she got into pop as one of the 5th Dimension pop supergroup. She married another of the 5th D stars, Billie Davis, and --Hollywood miracle --they're still married these decades later. And old Chuck "the Hat" Mangione is still performing. If you like his style, check out "Children of Sanchez" sometime.

I had one of his albums way back in the mid 80s. When i lost my dad in that time, i finally understood a strange little interlude between two of the songs, a brief few seconds of melody named 'Lullabye'. The lyrics he'd inserted, because he's just lost his dad, were:

Please somebody hold my hand
I'm scared and feel real shaky
Please somebody understand
I just now lost my daddy

Daddy said goodbye today
I miss him so already
I love mommy very much
But mommys can't be daddys

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i know, i know --schmaltz --but if there's anything good to remember about pop culture of the 70s - 80s turn --then that's it, the unabashed sentimentalism with all its silly warmth.