Kay Starr - You were only fooling while i was falling in love

In ten words, this sums up my love life quite completely. It should be my theme song, or my swan song, or my epitaph, or something.... and it sounds just as good now as it did back in the fifties, when I was young and horny and desperate. Now, I'm just desperate. Isn't progress wonderful?

If we looked through the playlists of our lives, we could probably describe our life stories in song titles down through the years... within limits, of course - you wouldn't include Arthur Godfrey's "I'm a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch" or "Mairzy Doats". But most of it down through the years might be used.

We paid a lot more attention to songs and their titles back when our main form of entertainment at home was a radio, or earlier still, a player piano. We learned the words, so that we could sing along and sometimes dance to them. There were shows like The Kraft Music Hall, and the Lux Radio Theater, and even guys like George Gershwin had their own radio shows in the 1930s and 1940s.

Today, George Gershwin is an almost mythical figure from musical history, but when I was a kid, he was a living, breathing, pipe-smoking, piano-playing showoff who joked around on the radio with other contemporaries having fun as they sold someone's latest laxative or some other product they probably never touched themselves. Now, everything's canned, overdubbed, remixed, and altered almost beyond recognition by guys who personally couldn't carry a tune in a suitcase. But it wasn't always like this....