The British Museum had lost its charm

I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?

My favourite version of A Foggy Day — a 1937 film tune from George and Ira that was introduced by Fred Astaire — was made about two decades later, by Billie Holiday.

It appears in Songs from Distingue Lovers, a Verve album from 1958, in which the label was hoping for the same sort of American songbook success as it had had with Ella Fitzgerald.

I bought the album when Verve issued it on CD. Part of becoming a mature young adult, I guess. More recently, I bought a fine reproduction on vinyl, and it’s one of the ones I never tire of when I want to read on the couch.

My love of the song may also have been connected to my fascination with London, a city I was so curious about as a kid and yet never got to visit until my 40s. The song’s line about the British Museum losing its charm made sense once I actually visited it: it’s surely impossible for such a thing to happen. The famous glass lattice roof did not exist in Holiday’s time, of course, but it comes to mind when I hear the song.

Holiday died in 1959. She was only 44. Her final years may have been marked by addiction and substance abuse, not to mention persecution by the U.S. federal government, but she also recorded some of her best work.