July 31, 2004
Blue MOoN
On a dare, a colleague of mine and I wrote a country music song. We called it “I Wish They Gave Green Stamps for Heartaches.” It wasn’t exactly Rodgers and Hart, but it got us accepted into a BMI amateur songwriters workshop. (What are green stamps? Ask Google.)
It’s not all that easy writing songs, but writing them under assignment is something else again. One of our tougher tasks was to write a love song without using the word “love.”
Rodgers and Hart had a similar problem when they wrote songs under contract to MGM. One melody they wrote went through at least four different titles and sets of lyrics before it got to be “Blue Moon” and become a standard in the mainstream jazz repertoire. (One of its titles, of all things, was “Prayer.”)
We get a blue moon tonight because it’s the second full one inside July’s boundaries. Full moons come every 29.5 days, so to fit two into a calendar month is not all that common. But they’re not all that blue, either. The Rodgers and Hart color was from melancholia, but the astronomic color apparently has more to do with long times than long faces.
Anyhow, even the tune confirms Julian of Norwich’s famous assurance, “All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” After lots of moaning and groaning, it sings, “And then there suddenly appeared before me / the only one my arms will ever hold / I heard somebody whisper, ‘Please adore me.’ / And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold!”
Take a long look tonight, then hug somebody and quit your mooning. (Not that kind, silly!)