Of course there’s no “h” in the actual title but I’m putting it in anyway to alert singers to the long vowel because the money-grubbing whore who wrote the lyrics to this Broadway musical standard didn’t give two shits for singers.
Above: After some silliness, the boys deliver a splendid rendition of the Frederick Loewe standard, “They Call the Wind Mariah” from Paint Your Wagon (Broadway, 1951)
I, however, have a lot of affection and admiration for Berlin-born-and-trained composer Frederick Loewe, who wrote the most tuneful, singable melodies on Broadway, up there with Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern. Loewe was right not to want to have anything to do with the big-screen disaster, Paint Your Wagon, which plowed on without him (Paramount, 1969), messing up Josh Logan, Paddy Chayefsky(!), Jean Seberg, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, et al, in its trail…
The only way to read the 1969 film (and I don’t recommend watching it for pleasure ever ever ever, not even for yummy Clint) is to look at it like a late-60s hippie festival, complete with trees, mud, and crazy sex. (You know, like Woodstock…) The absolutely unreal pluralism of the background characters—Jews, Italians, whites (but no blacks), Chinese dressed in brocade with their wives(!?) all living in this dirty mining camp (a dirty mining camp where men politely doff their hats to white women) peacefully together—is another hippie fantasy, with a dollop of Chayefsky the liberal (of Marty and Network fame) added.
The one good thing in this pile of offal is the song, “They Call the Wind Mariah”, sung incongruously by Harve Presnell; but beautifully and hauntingly here by, of all people, the Smothers Brothers, the shining jokester-balladeer heroes of my youth. (Adding to their luster: as wartime US Army brats, they spent part of their childhood in the Philippines.)
Here’s hoping you haven’t watched/heard Paint Your Wagon. If you have, and the Andre Previn interpolations made you (like me) sick*, here are two lovely selections from the pen of Frederick Loewe, rendered by my bonny John Wilson and his various orchestras:
- Transylvanian March and Embassy Waltz from My Fair Lady / Frederick Loewe, orchestration by Alexander Courage (John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London)
- The Heather On the Hill from Brigadoon / Lerner-Loewe arr Conrad Salinger (John Wilson and The John Wilson Orchestra)
*…And that blustering Hollywood chickenshit should’ve punched Woody Allen in the nose.
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 