This week at Sometimes a Song we will be listening to an American jazz standard. In fact, “Body and Soul” may be the most-recorded jazz tune of all time. It has been performed by singers and musicians as various as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Billie Holliday, Perry Como, Guy Lombardo, Sarah Vaughn, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, …

For our Friday podcasts this fall, Dr. Esolen will continue to read all of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn aloud, chapter by chapter! And now Huck, who has stolen back the money the “Duke” and the “Dauphin” have swindled out of the three orphan girls, is working out a plan to get that money back to them, to expose the deadbeats as the frauds they are…

I mentioned a couple of days ago, in discussing our Word of the Week, soul, that you might give up your life for something you believe in, or for the people you love most in the world, but giving up your soul is another matter. And in our Film of the Week, All My Sons, the main character, Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson), has made that terrible trad…

The author of our Hymn of the Week, or at least of the first stanza, was quite a player in the politics and the English church of his day. His name was Richard Baxter, a man who seemed capable of putting everybody off, not because he was boorish or aggressive (he wasn’t), but because he would not go along to the bitter end with one or another form …

“And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” says the sacred author, “and man became a living soul.” For me that is one of the most profound verses in all of Scripture, and one of the most mysterious. It cannot simply be that ha-adam was lifeless and inert before that breath, and then he got to move around. Michelangelo, I think, dramat…

Sometimes a Song is little but lovely like our selection for this week, “How High the Moon.” What it comes down to are two verses and a refrain with slight variation, and a brief but wistful and tuneful melody. That’s all, but wow! what a musical punch this little song packs. Written by a not-so-famous lyricist (Nancy Hamilton, better known for her…

What does it require to be someone in a position of high authority? How do you get the best from the men you lead? In Paradise Lost, as we saw yesterday, Satan enjoys the lordliness of it all, but it’s an odd kind of leadership that sweeps your followers straight into hell. Yet the true leader cannot be a merely nominal one, either. He must be both…

Sometimes a a happy song is written by a not particularly kind or likable guy. How is that? I haven’t been able to find out much biographical information about the composer of today’s selection, “Side by Side.” Harry Woods came from a musical family. His mother was a concert pianist, and although her son was born with a serious deformation of one o…

The night was April 15, 1912. The weather was fair, and the ship was the greatest ever conceived by the human mind and built by human hands. She was on her maiden voyage, the last long leg of which was to take her from the port town of Cobh, in Ireland (pronounce it “COVE,” as that’s what it means; it’s just the Gaelic way to spell the English word…

The scene for our Hymn of the Week is one of the most memorable in the Gospels. It is the Sea of Galilee, the lowest freshwater lake in the world, near the head of the Jordan River, in the “rift valley” that you can see as the top right-hand side of the upside down triangle that is the Sinai Peninsula. It’s like a long crease in the land, and at th…

Our back-to-school discount is still on at Word & Song, good for new paid and upgraded subscriptions as well as gifts (for the students, teachers, homeschoolers, and just about anyone who might like our magazine). This week we have focused on friendship here at Word & Song. Today’s Sometimes a Song is about a singer-songwriter who qualifies as an “…