Melancholy Quintet of Songs

On Valentine’s Day, people are always playing these lovey-dovey songs. It being roughly six months from that holiday, I thought I would link to some of those songs I used to play when I broke up with someone. Haven’t done that in well over a decade, fortunately, yet the songs themselves still make me melancholy. It’s strange how music still holds its sway.

The Supremes – Remove This Doubt. You may know this from the Elvis Costello cover, but the original is from one of my favorite Motown albums of the 1960s, The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Me and Donna George

I had this friend named Donna George. I knew her from work with the socially-active Albany United Methodist Society. I don’t know why, but certain people, including a particular pastor, treated her quite badly, taking advantage of her good will. I think that, at some level, I felt a lot of sympathy for her. Ultimately, she saw our relationship one way, and I another, yet we managed to maintain a friendship in spite of that.

In 2002, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. Knowing she would be incapable of making decisions very soon, she got three or four of her friends to come to St. Peter’s hospice to explain her wishes that we divvy up her music, books and art and give them to various buddies before she died, lest her family, from whom she was mostly estranged, could get their hands on them.

I was one of the folks in charge of the music, giving this person some Sinatra, and that person some classical albums, et al. I held onto a Beach Boys box set, which I had given her, and I also kept the Roberta Flack album Quiet Fire, for it contained a cover of the BeeGees’ To Love Somebody, which represented in song what she wished our relationship would be.

Roberta Flack is 75

I’m fairly sure Roberta Flack’s turning 75; while some sources have her listed as being born in 1939, her Facebook page and the Wikipedia have her born in 1937. It’s likely it was my sister Leslie who turned me on to Roberta’s music. She owned the second album, Chapter Two, which she played rather constantly. I almost felt badly that Roberta achieved a modicum of commercial success; we thought Roberta was our little secret, known by the cognisanti.

I had the pleasure of seeing her perform at First Night in Albany about a dozen years ago. She has been living