Music Monday on a Tuesday

I wasn't here yesterday to do Music Monday on yer actual Monday as I was in transit from a (lovely, sunny) long weekend on Dorset's beaches. On the way home I was listening to my iTrip* (*not actually an iTrip but some ultracheap knockoff I bought off Amazon which just about transmits to my radio if they are within no more than two inches of one another, but hey, that'll do) and reflecting on how, when we used to drive to Dorset as a family, we would listen to only the following tapes ever, for as long as I can remember throughout my entire childhood:

- the Muppet tape - an distinctive olive green tape with songs and skits from the Muppet Show on it (good grief the comedian's a bear!)
- Ella Fitzgerald's Greatest Hits
- Louis Armstrong's greatest hits
- Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
- the Bubbling Brown Sugar original cast recording

And that's it, for well over a decade. I think you could probably trace all of my musical preferences and half of my personality back to that very list. (I will no doubt be returning to one or more of the above for future Music Mondays.)

That's all very well, I hear you say, but it would be helpful for us to judge your taste, not to mention your sanity, if we knew what Bubbling Brown Sugar is.

I'm so glad you asked. Bubbling Brown Sugar is a musical set in a nightclub in Harlem from the 1920s to the 1940s and features songs from artists including Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller, which played in London in 1977, the year after I was born. I nver actually saw it, but I can probably do the entire album by heart - not necessarily in any way that another human being might enjoy, mind you - and when I was very small, my favourite song was called 'Strollin'. The singer said that in order to be cool you had to stroll, and in order to stroll you had to "walk with your left leg dipping a bit, resembling a limp". I thought this sounded like a great idea, so that's exactly what I did. All the time. Without telling anybody. I was three. My mother thought that I had orthopedic problems and nearly took me to see a specialist, except that I got bored of doing it just in time.

Here's a bit of Bubbling Brown Sugar performed on a Dutch TV gala a few years ago. No strolling, alas.