“Big Yellow Taxi” is a song written, composed, and originally recorded by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell in 1970, and originally released on her third album, Ladies of the Canyon (1970). Released in April 1970 by Reprise Records, the single was a hit in her native Canada (No. 15) as well as Australia (No. 6) and […]
Boogie-Woogie
Boogie-woogie is a genre of blues music that became popular during the late 1920s, but already developed in African-American communities since the 1870s. It was eventually extended from piano to piano duo and trio, guitar, big band, country and western, and gospel. While standard blues traditionally expresses a variety of emotions, boogie-woogie is mainly dance […]
You Can’t Hurry Love
“You Can’t Hurry Love” is a song originally recorded by the Supremes on the Motown label and was the second single from the Supremes’ album The Supremes A’ Go-Go… The song “You Can’t Hurry Love”, is a memory of a mother’s words (“My mama said ‘you can’t hurry love/No you just have to wait’”) telling […]
Chaconne
A Chaconne is a type of musical composition often used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line (ground bass) which offers a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention. In this it closely resembles the passacaglia. It originates and was particularly popular […]
Carmen Jones
Carmen Jones is a 1943 Broadway musical with music by Georges Bizet (orchestrated for Broadway by Robert Russell Bennett) and lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II which was performed at The Broadway Theatre. Conceptually, it is Bizet’s opera Carmen updated to a World War II-era, African-American setting. Bizet’s opera was, in turn, based on […]