Much as I love the great musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, who genuinely elevated American musical theater of the 1920’s and 1930’s to the level of high art in the 1940’s, I must admit to being extremely fond of the works of Richard Rodgers and his first longtime composing partner, Lorenz Hart. Larry Hart was in many ways a very sad and lonely s…

It may slip our minds — it certainly has slipped my mind — that when his foster-father Joseph died, Jesus was left an orphan in the sense in which the word is usually employed in Scripture. That is, he was fatherless; in the earthly way, I mean. He was no orphan absolutely. We can recall his words to Mary and Joseph, when, as a twelve year old boy …

I hope that my readers here at Word & Song won’t mind listening again to a great song about one man’s dream of escaping from his lonely life by dreaming of going back home. If you missed this song before, please do listen now and read about the tremendously talented Roy Orbison. And today I’m attaching a bonus version of Roy’s song which he recorde…

Dear Readers, I’ll bet a lot of you said to yourselves, “The Film of the Week has got to be The Great Escape!” — since, after all, our Word of the Week was escape, and for sheer film adventure with a breadth of characters, and such wonderfully fun actors to watch as Donald Pleasance, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, and Steve Mc…

Our Hymn of the Week is one of the most haunting and powerful that I know, as it speaks not only to the dire injustice of slavery in the American south before the Civil War, but to the state of all mankind suffering in bondage. I’ll admit here that the prisons we build for ourselves are the hardest of all from which to escape, and it is well said t…

Sometimes a Song is about a composer, and sometimes it is about a singer. Bobby Darin was both. But singers of his generation were following the trend toward folk and rock music, and where Bobby fit in was not immediately clear. Born in 1936 and raised by his grandparents (who he’d been told were his parents), Darin obviously grew up influenced by …

If I didn’t know better, I’d think my life had been a string of lucky chances, but all is in the hands of God, whose providential eye is on the sparrow, and there is nothing that is too big or too small for His attention. His infinity is not endlessness in space, and his eternity is not perpetuity in time, but they are utterly beyond both — as, if …

I mentioned last week how much I enjoy writing about great song-writing teams for Sometimes a Song. Today’s “team” in fact only wrote a handful of songs together in their separate long careers working solo or with an assortment of other writers. But what they achieved together was pretty impressive. For the first (and I think only) time in film his…