The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

October 4, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives 

Every Sunday, The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time Richard Nixon became President in 1969.

YOU BELONG TO ME written by CHILTON PRICE, PEE WEE KING, REDD STEWART

As the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” continues to monopolize the Number One spot on the Billboard 1969 Hot 100 for the next fortnight, we will have an opportunity to examine some other popular music from back in the day.

Fifty-seven years ago this week, the Number One song in America was Jo Stafford’s cover of “You Belong To Me” — a recording that played an early part in the Soundtracker’s own introduction to popular music.

Preparing last weekend’s Weekend Reward —the “Tennessee Waltz”— stirred some mighty fond memories.  In 1952, when the I was just becoming interested in the songs I was hearing on the radio, my grandfather began walking with me on Saturday mornings to our local record store and allowing me to choose one 78-RPM disc.  These weekly  walks —which we started referring to as “the meeting”— only lasted a few years before he died, but they are still vividly recalled; as are many of the records I selected — the beginnings of a collection that now covers more than half a century.   And two of the earliest, and most fondly remembered, are Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” and Jo Stafford’s “You Belong To Me.”

“You Belong to Me” has proven to be a song for all seasons.  Its haunting major-minor melody and plaintive lyrics have been amenable to the differing styles of different decades, and the song —in addition to being a standard— has been a perennial hit, from Jo Stafford’s big band ballad megahit to Bob Dylan’s stripped-down acoustic masterpiece.

“You Belong To Me” composer Chilton Price (left), photographed with Canadian singing coach Theresa Weatherbee.  On Tuesday morning, in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Frankfort, Ms. Price will be awarded a Kentucky Governor’s Award in Arts.

In the early 1950s, Chilton Price was a young woman working as the music librarian at her hometown radio station — Louisville’s WAVE.  When bandleader Pee Wee King and his vocalist Redd Stewart came through, she showed them some songs she had written and asked their advice.  The pros arranged and recorded the songs, and the result of this fortuitous collaboration was the 1951 Number One hit “Slow Poke,” and 1952’s ”You Belong To Me.”  Although both songs were really all Price’s, the three shared the writing credit.

“You Belong To Me” had been written during World War Two, and by the early ’50s, the song’s unfolding geography had become romantic rather than poignant.  In fact, it was perfectly timed for the first stirrings of America’s post-war interest in commercial air travel.

Here’s the song, with its original country flavor, as performed by two-thirds of the creative team that produced it: Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart with the Golden West Cowboys:

In 1952 Jo Stafford gave the song the big band big ballad treatment and her record spent almost a month in the Number One spot — where it was ensconced fifty-seven years ago this week.  1952 was the year of “You Belong To Me” — in addition to the Stafford smash,  covers of the song by Patti Page and Dean Martin also reached the Top Ten.

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise from a tropic isle
Just remember darling all the while
You belong to me

See the market place in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember when a dream appears
You belong to me

I’ll be so alone without you
Maybe you’ll be lonesome too, and blue

Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain
Just remember till you’re home again
You belong to me

Ten years later , a Jersey City doo wop group called the Duprees released a cover that rose to Number 7 on the pop charts:

In 1994 Quentin Tarantino took an outtake from Bob Dylan’s 1992 album Good As I Been To You and used it on the soundtrack of his film Natural Born Killers.  I was bowled over by this brilliantly barebones deconstruction the first time I heard it, playing away beneath the gory claptrap.  And I still think it’s one of the most moving pop recordings I’ve ever heard — it never fails to get the goosebumps going.

“You Belong To Me” entered the Twenty-First Century via the soundtrack for the animated film Shrek.  Jason Wade, the frontman of Lifehouse, provided a very popular but, at least to the Soundtracker’s ears, a very pale Dylanesque rendition that, in the bridge, barely bothers to touch base with Chilton Price’s song.

Comments