| |
|
|
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Jo Stafford, "You Belong to Me"
September 13, 1952
See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me postcards and souvenirs
Just remember when a dream appears
You belong to me.
There's a man who's travelling around the world, and there's a husky girl singer who tells him that no matter how far he goes, he belongs to her. The marimba flourish at the beginning establishes "far" is as far as exoticaland, everywhere hot and sexily not-America, and the verses spell out it further: the Nile, a tropic isle, old Algiers, the jungle, a silver plane over the middle of the ocean. With the economies of scale for relatively inexpensive transcontinental air travel not yet in place, I think we can safely assume somebody in '52 who travels zig-zag 'cross the globe must be loaded, or well-connected, or both. This helps establish the song's central irony -- he's powerful but she owns him -- and renders Jo's lover, otherwise nameless and faceless, as worldly in a sort of James Bond way. Which makes me wonder...how many people in 1952 heard the singer's love-object as being not an international playboy or fearless capitalist, but a spy? A vanishingly small minority, I bet, probably also the same number who heard the "when a dream appears" line and thought Jo was admonishing her lover not to fuck the local Algerians. 5
(link) |
|
|
|
|
|
