Lesley Gore, "You Don't Own Me"

It's International Women's Day, so here's a feminist anthem from 1964, the year I graduated from high school, sung by the daughter of the inventor of Gore-Tex.

Paul Whiteman's Rhythm Boys, featuring Bing Crosby: "My Suppressed Desire".

Bing Crosby's rich baritone is one of my early childhood memories. My parents had his Christmas album, from which I especially remember his stirring rendition of Adeste Fideles, sung in Latin and then in English as "O Come All Ye Faithful", and "White Christmas", on which he sounded as if he had a bit of a cold; for a long time I thought it was "Wide Christmas". Dad and Mom, though neither was Irish, also had his album of songs from the auld sod, which included such soulful traditional ballads as "Mac Namara's Band" and " It's The Same Old Shillelagh". One of my earliest cinema memories is The Road to Bali, one of several "Road" movies, made from the early 1940s to the early '60s, starring Bing, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour.

"My Suppressed Desire", for which I thank Mike Pearl for the link, is from much earlier in Bing's career. Bing isn't credited by name on this 1928 record by Paul Whiteman's Rhythm Boys, with whom Bing did his first recordings. On this song, Bing does some scat singing, which I once had the temerity to compare to abstract expressionist painting.

Anyway, I love this song. It's the theme song from a movie titled Gang War, which, coincidentally, was edited by Archie Marshek, who also edited The Road to Bali.