Song 744: This week the playlist features Autumn Leaves by Roger Williams, written by Joseph Kosma, and you can find a cool YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Anyone living in the northeast area of the U.S., or somewhere else with a similar climate, can understand the implications of this tune's title, and has probably seen plenty of examples of the term in the last few weeks, as I have. The YouTube video here comes from an appearance by Roger Williams on the Ed Sullivan Show on January 1, 1956. At some point in that era, my folks got our family's first TV, and very soon, we got to see the Ed Sullivan Show regularly, so it's possible that we might have witnessed that appearance. However, I'm not sure if we even had the tube when Mr. Williams appeared on the show on the first day of 1956. The descending piano riffs he features in the piece do sound quite familiar, so it is possible that I did get to see and hear that segment, though I also might have experienced a rerun of the sequence on a later date. My family at the time had an upright piano sitting next to the TV back then, and even before we got the tube, I had spent some time pounding my fingers on that keyboard, so it's possible that I might have figured out those descending riffs myself and given my own family a musical sense of autumn leaves.
