Tuesday 24 March 2009

Sing a song of sad young men ...


...
If there is anyone who has been following Your Heart Out they will hopefully have noticed a number of names recurring and beginning to emerge as secret heroes of the text. Among those names are the composer Tommy Wolf and the singer/guitarist Davy Graham.


Well, those two names come perfectly together with Davy's heartbreaking rendition of Tommy's Ballad of the Sad Young Men. There have been many beautiful renditions of this song (Anita O'Day and Mark Murphy spring to mind) but there's something about this performance ... and if there were ever a song for our times then this is it.


In the first edition of Your Heart Out we made a passing reference to a clip on YouTube of Davy performing Cry Me A River in an old BBC documentary, which again is quite beautiful and can be found here. It's intriguing the way the Julie London/Barney Kessell version of this song had such an influence on the development of bossa nova in Brazil. Ah


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