Bill Wells vs Judy Garland

In constant rotation on the borrowed CD-player at True Manors are Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Blind Blake and Teenage: The Creation Of Youth 1911-1946.

The latter is a superlative compilation celebrating the emergence of the (American, mostly) teenager in the first half of the 20th Century, put together by Jon Savage. This means plenty of jitterbugs, stomps, boogies, swing-time music and jives - some of my favourite music to listen to, AM. I am by now way intimate with Mildred Bailey's call-out to the youth to quit wearing zoot suits (as favoured by Mexican Americans in LA during the 40s) and get into uniform, and Baron Lee's cheeky paean to that feller my peers still give shout-outs to, the 'Reefer Man'. There's jazz, the way I like jazz. There's The Mills Brothers celebrating a passing craze in teeth-suckingly sweet harmony. There's Louis Jordan of course, doing a Bilko a full decade or more before Bilko came along. There's Duke Ellington doing his whole Cotton Club Stomp. There's a whole bunch of stuff, basically.

But damn, if Judy Garland doesn't come along and outshine everyone else on a brace of songs - the mewling, poignant 'In-Between', which neatly captures the annoyance of being caught in that spot where you're "too old for toys" but "too young for boys" (i.e. Jodie Foster four decades early), sung in that forceful, near-histrionic style of hers that always made her sound 50 years older than she actually was. And 'The Jitterbug', the 'lost' scene from The Wizard Of Oz, which mixes up voodoo imagery and insane stomping to... Hey, wait up. You are in tune with The Wizard Of Oz, aren't you? I mean, damn, that's where the battle lines have always been drawn.

The only time I ever got a drop-in on The Stranger's cover was the week before I arrived in town in 1998 and wrote a story entitled something like '10 Reasons Why I Might Be Gay' - and right there at Number 3 or thereabouts (just behind my collection of Spice Girls dolls) was my abiding love for Judy, particularly in her later years. Not that I know too much about Judy Garland, you understand...