Time Out Ten
Where I Sit
For this item you need to be able to stop for ten minutes.
We are often moving on to the next job, the next meeting, scrolling down social media, taking the next call ......'Time Out Ten' asks you to stop for ten minutes and listen to a particular piece of music; to find a time when you won't be interrupted, when you can put in/on your headphones and chill out. Ten minutes isn't long.
Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop.
(A.A. Milne)
Do you have a favourite place where you can sit and relax.? Perhsps that's at home - 'Your Chair' - or at work, in a local park, or in your favourite cafe?
For this month's Time Out Ten, we can spend a few minutes sitting and listening to Hoagy Carmichael sing his song Rockin' Chair.
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Written in 1929, the song was first recorded on February 19, 1929 by Hoagy Carmichael as a test for Victor Records, but not released at the time. This recording was later released on the Historical label as HLA-37. Hoagy Carmichael and his Orchestra recorded a new version on May 21, 1930 featuring Bix Beiderbecke on cornet and that is the version we can listen to here. The rest of the personnel including Bubber Miley, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman are detailed on the page. This second version has two vocalists (Carmichael and Irving Brodsky) and was released on Victor Records as V-38139B
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Listen to it here.
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"When I was 23, my Norwegian relatives taught me how to sit still. During the long sunlit evenings in the summer of 1992, my cousins would lead me across the farm to the edge of the forest, each of us lugging a folding chair. There, in a scraggly bramble of wild blueberries, we would set them down a few yards apart, each in our own little patch."
(Hope Jahren)
