I’m sure a lot of younger people don’t know who Jimmy Dean was, confuse him with James Dean or only know the name as a sausage brand. But to me, Jimmy Dean means just one thing: “Big Bad John.”

Lena Horne: A Life in YouTube — Kate Dailey put together an eclectic collection of Lena Horne videos from “Stormy Weather” to “It’s Not Easy Being Green” (a Sesame Street duet with Kermit the Frog) for Newsweek’s Human Condition blog

You never know what you’ll find when you go searching around on YouTube. I have written here before about searching for the song Peoria. I was hoping to find a performance of the song by Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band that I remembered from my childhood, but instead I found a lively performance by the Duesseldorfer Banjo Club.

Last night I was searching again, this time looking for videos of Clancy Hayes, popular singer and banjo player who did the vocals for the Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band. What I found was a record I didn’t know existed, Hayes singing a song for Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1960 Presidential campaign.

It’s a catchy number, featuring lines like this:

They’ve proved they have the know-how
To guide our ship of state
Through fair and stormy weather
That’s for sure!

Not much video in this video — it’s just a still shot of the record. Great Tweed label, though!

The examples on the YouTube page are people like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and the Black-Eyed Peas, but I’ve found it works just as well with the real oldies like Cab Calloway, Jack Teagarden and Kate Smith.

There are a lot of music recommendation services and personalized internet radio services out there which may have more features, but I like the speed and simplicity of YouTube’s service, along with the video content that’s available here, especially for the old stuff. None of the recommendation services are perfect, but I like using them even if I disagree with a lot of the selections. This can be a good way to find new artists — or in my case, new OLD artists.

Here’s a screenshot of the Mix Tape page for Jack Teagarden. You can click on this to see a larger image, or better yet, just go to YouTube and try this yourself! You don’t need to have a YouTube account to try this, only to save the playlist.

• Music Discovery Project — Direct link to this YouTube service
• Jack Teagarden and Friends — My video mix playlist of Jack Teagarden and similar artists
• YouTube Music Discovery — Post from the unofficial Google Operating System blog
• YouTube Launches Music Discovery Project “Disco” — Post from RollingStone

But I am finding it more difficult to choose the right one for the living. For my sister, I think it would be “We Three Kings.” Not sure if she now considers it her favorite, but she certainly enjoyed dramatically singing the more depressing verses when we were young. For me, it’s definitely “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” but I’m not sure anyone knows that. For others in the family and some of my friends, I have some ideas, but I’m really not sure.

Does everyone have a favorite Christmas song? What’s yours, and why? Do you know the favorites of your parents and grandparents? We should record these things — I am currently working on family trees for both sides of my family, and I’d be much more interested in knowing the favorite Christmas songs of my grandparents, great grandparents, etc., than in finding their graves or figuring out if they were really born in 1896 or 1897.

Maybe people should put this in their wills — I hereby request that my heirs and their descendants play ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ once each year, and think of me.

For my mother, here’s her favorite, as sung by Judy Garland in the movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

In Flanders Field
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

When I was a child, my parents had an old recording of this song and I loved it’s rousing, patriotic cheerfulness, sending the boys off to the War to End All Wars. But in school my teacher recited In Flanders Field to the class, and I found the middle verse chilling: “We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…” I still do, and think of it every time I read more young men and women going off to war and dying.

Over There, by George M. Cohan, sung by Arthur Fields, Columbia A2470, recorded in 1917, from the 78RPM Collection on the Internet Archive

This ten minute black-and-white film was made for the Chevrolet Division, General Motors Corporation, and is one of several Jam Handy productions from the Prelinger Archives available through the Internet Archive.

On the Air — Internet Archive

I’m off to Chicago for the American Library Association conference tomorrow, and this song is stuck in my head. It plays there pretty much nonstop every time I’m there. My father used to play the Bob Scobey record of this all the time when I was a child, and the lyrics fascinated me. I had no clear idea of what a “toddlin’” town might be, but it sounded cool. I assumed that “Billy Sunday” was a mythical character, like Mother Nature and Father Time, and assumed that this line meant that Chicago didn’t observe the kind of Blue Laws we had in Massachusetts, and that people there went grocery shopping on the Sabbath. I wondered about State Street, that great street, and wondered exactly what they did there that they don’t do on Broadway, but thought perhaps it was better not to ask!

Here’s a wonderful version of the song, featuring Blossom Seeley (voice), Lil Hardin-Armstrong (voice and keyboard), Jack Teagarden (Trombone) and Jimmy Noone (clarinet.) The video quality is pretty bad, but that gives it a hazy, dreamlike quality that I think works well here.

Hard to know what to say, what to remember, what’s better forgotten. But I do like this performance of the song “Ben” from the Sonny and Cher show. Here Jackson has outgrown the his role as the talented little kid with the Jackson 5, and not yet become the King of Pop…and all that came later.