Friday, August 17, 2007

Stamp of the Day: Big Band (and a drummer)

This is the only stamp I could find that featured a drummer, OK, he is in the background, but he IS there. This stamp is part of the US Millenium set that featured major events and issues in the 1900s. This is only part of a big band orchestra I think.

I like Glenn Miller's big band music, like the Chattanooga-Choo-Choo, with lyrics like this:








Pardon me, boy
Is that the Chattanooga choo choo?
Track twenty-nine
Boy, you can gimme a shine
I can afford
To board a Chattanooga choo choo
I've got my fare
And just a trifle to spare
[...]
You leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner
Nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham an' eggs in Carolina

When you hear the whistle blowin' eight to the bar
Then you know that Tennessee is not very far
Shovel all the coal in
Gotta keep it rollin'
Woo, woo, Chattanooga there you are


Chattanooga is a city in the south of the US, in Tennessee, right here. I have never been there. But they have an incline railway up Lookout Mountain (funny name for a mountain!).

6 comments:

PP said...

Here I go again, and again...posted this morning but because of probs with the wireless here "it didn't take"
Funny they don't tell us who is depicted in the stamp. To me it looks like Ella and the Chick Webb band.(except Chick was black..)
Chick was actually a drummer as well and gave Ella her start. I love the records of Ella's first recordings with Chick, solid swing at its best, at least in the Big Band mode.

Chick Webb

LS said...

If it is Ella, then it must be a very young Ella right?

PP said...

She was 18 when she started with Chick Webb

LS said...

They couldn't have changed him from black to white, right?

O.K. said...

USPS have tampered with images before, so why not. Most notably they have removed cigarettes from stamps of Jackson Pollock, Robert Johnson and others. See here.

But to change a black guy into a white guy would not be very P.C...

LS said...

Ha, I was considering having the Jackson POllock stamp as Stamp of the Day soon, because I read this article in Time or Newsweek about some paintings they found that might be his. I don't care that much about this paintings, too abstract, but I like that he did his thing and stuck to it.