Music of the Day, 31 August 2024
don't mess with Mr. In-Between
Today’s MotD comes to you via its title popping into my mind, along with the barest whisper of an auditory memory. As the song is 80 years old, I expected to have difficulties trying to match my memory to a specific version. What a sweet summer child I am! There are far more performances of it than I expected,1 and the few I listened to have obliterated my memory, so I don’t think I’ll ever know whose performance was the first I heard.
I’m sure I heard it from my parents’ collection when I was young, as they had several jazz and big band albums. I doubt I gave it much thought after that, until it popped up in the early ‘90s as the theme song to a television show I really liked.2 Back then, I don’t think I recognized the singer’s unique voice from a different project I adored as a kid, but today it hit me immediately.
That’s Jack Sheldon singing “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”,3 a 1944 song written by Johnny Mercer (lyrics) and Harold Arlen (music). They styled it as a sermon, which is how Mercer performed it in 1945 with the Pied Pipers:
In the small sample I’ve listened to this morning, the covers are pretty evenly split between including the sermon opening and not. At the risk of boring you with the repetition, I’ll include a couple more that I like.4 Dr. John’s may become my favorite:
I don’t think I’ve heard anything by Jools Holland before today; his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra and Rumer on vocals do a beautiful version.
If I haven’t exhausted you yet and you’d like to explore other covers of this upbeat classic, Wikipedia’s list is a good jump-off point. If you find one you really like, please share it in the comments.
including a Van Morrison cover of it just last year. Now that’s staying power!
and decades later, my kids discovered it via Fallout 4. I almost fell off my chair the first time I heard it there!
also styled as the words are normally written
Alas, the late great Al Jarreau’s rendition will not be included. Much as I adore his work, his take on this piece doesn’t move me.
My wife, a frustratingly optimistic sort, frequently breaks out in this song, usually to insert a shiv into a difficult moment.
"I feel a sermon comin' on me/The topic will be sin/and that's what I'm agin' ".
Mercer was a superb lyricist with a unique grasp of the national American vocabulary very few of them had, and Arlen was an ideal musical partner for him. They were also responsible together for writing "The Blues In The Night", "That Old Black Magic" and "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)".