Programming note: Mark will be back in audio on Friday with the latest entry to our series of audio adventures, Tales for Our Time.

Happy Father's Day to you and yours. We have some Father's Day moments from The Mark Steyn Show here, and we close out the day with a song for those about to qualify for the category. I miss my dad more and more as the years go by. This Song for the Season is one he used to like singing - mostly the "My boy Bill" bit, because it all gets a little more complicated after that. It's more than a song, but a dramatic soliloquy on imminent fatherhood. This essay is adapted from my book A Song for the Season:

I wonder what he'll think of me
I guess he'll call me
The old man
I guess he'll think I can lick
Ev'ry other feller's father –
Well, I can!

The greatest of all songs about fatherhood was written for the 1945 Broadway hit Carousel. It was Rodgers & Hammerstein's follow-up to Oklahoma! and ever after Dick Rodgers' favorite score. Hard to disagree. Yet, in a show that includes "If I Loved You" and "What's The Use Of Wond'rin'?" and the magnificent "Carousel Waltz" that opens the evening, the "Soliloquy" is still the stand-out: Oscar Hammerstein's meditation on impending fatherhood in all its facets. At the risk of over-generalising, maternity for mothers is a physical process, growing inside you. With fathers, it's different: you're told you're going to become a dad and, insofar as there's any growth process at all, it's psychological. That's what Rodgers & Hammerstein capture so well. If motherhood is something that swells inside you across nine months, in this "Soliloquy" fatherhood grows in the space of some nine minutes, from barroom braggadocio...

My boy, Bill!
He'll be tall
And as tough as a tree
Will Bill!

...to a kind of fearful understanding of his responsibilities:

I got to get ready before she comes
I got to make certain that she
Won't be dragged up in slums
With a lot o' bums like me...

It was introduced on the stage of the Majestic Theatre by John Raitt, father of Bonnie and the great Broadway voice of his generation. Here he is reprising it seven years later on The General Foods 25th Anniversary Show:

Almost every interpreter of the Carousel "Soliloquy" in the years since has been a broad-chested theatre singer in the Raitt tradition, but rarely do they pull off that final B-flat with such confident ease. Nor do they inhabit the character quite so convincingly. John Raitt was playing the role of Billy Bigelow, a carney barker, a no-account roustabout better at getting girls than at getting ahead. Billy has a glib cocksure charm and at the big First Act finale, when his wife Julie tells him she's expecting their child, he conjures a boy in his own image:

...and you won't see nobody dare to try
To boss him or toss him around
No pot-bellied, baggy-eyed bully'll boss him around!

I don't give a damn what he does
As long as he does what he likes
He can sit on his tail
Or work on a rail
With a hammer, hammering spikes...

And it's only halfway through the number that the thought occurs:

What if he's ...a girl?

Rodgers & Hammerstein started adapting Molnar's Liliom into Carousel in 1944 and were doing okay in a dogged sort of way until they wrote this long, through-sung scene that closes the First Act. Hammerstein, in articulating the swagger and tenderness and awful premonitions of a simple man, and Rodgers, in setting the character's emotional evolution to brilliantly contrasting thematic material, unlocked the door to the show's essence, and the rest of the score poured out of them.

Carousel opened on April 19th 1945. The following month, Zeke Zarchy, the lead trumpeter on Frank Sinatra's radio show, went over to the singer's pad for dinner. "There were half a dozen people," he told Will Friedwald, "and we all walked into his den where he had his hi-fi set up. He played us some things from Carousel, which had just come out. We heard the big 'Soliloquy' that the main character sings, and we were all impressed with it. Frank said, 'These are the kinds of things that I want to do.'"

Back then, that was tougher than it sounds. A brisk "Soliloquy" clocks in at eight minutes. That's a long song, so long that the published sheet music cost twice the usual 50 cents. Even broken in two, as Columbia did with Frank's recording in 1946, it's a tight fit on both sides of a 78. Yet Sinatra even then recognised the uniqueness of the piece, from anticipation of all the fun the guy's gonna have with "my boy Bill" to the slowly dawning terror of responsibility. Halfway through, on that line "What if he's a ...girl?", Frank, a recent father of one of each, sings with a kind of bewildered disgust. But the sentiment leads into some of the most lyrical passages Rodgers ever wrote and Sinatra ever sang:

Invariably, when Sinatra picked up on a song, the other top-rank pop singers would go, oh, yeah, and get around to it too. With "Soliloquy" none of them did, or do. Maybe it was because not only is it tough to sing but it's tough to act. So the lone exception to the popsters steering clear of it was Frank's Rat Pack pally Sam:

Other than that, here's Jan Clayton excerpting it for the distaff side:

That doesn't work for me. The piece is so precisely tailored to fatherhood that you can't just turn it into mother-daughter time without draining it of all genuine feeling. Mary Rodgers, a fine composer in her own right and also the author of her own exploration of parents and children, Freaky Friday, told me she only once saw her father display any emotion - when her mother suffered a miscarriage late in life and dad sobbed on his teenage daughter's shoulders because it was his last chance for a son. Thus, as she understood it, even his vulnerability was an implicit criticism of her. It's a strange moment, weirdly echoing the "What if he's a girl?" moment in "Soliloquy". By contrast, Sinatra, for a showbiz pop, was a real father, loved to the end by all three of his kids.

Frank stayed with the "Soliloquy" for the next half-century. In the Fifties, he was supposed to do the film of Carousel, but quit the set when they told him he'd have to do every scene twice, once for the regular cameras, another for the new CinemaScope system. It was twice as much work, so, not unreasonably, he asked for twice as much dough. They balked, he walked - although he was looking for a pretext to scram to Africa and patch a spat with Ava who was out there filming.. In the Sixties, he recorded it again for The Concert Sinatra in an arrangement by Nelson Riddle. The orchestration and the voice are almost too good – too clean, too pure, compared with the very raw, tentative Frank of two decades earlier:

But he and the arrangement grew together, and into the early Nineties you could still see him on stage in Atlantic City or London or Tokyo pushing himself through a punishing full-scale recreation of Billy Bigelow – the role he should have played on film condensed into ten minutes a night in recital halls and sports arenas around the world decade after decade. Round about the last time I met him, I saw some guy sing the "Soliloquy" in the Royal National Theatre revival of Carousel: great voice - if you think a voice is about hitting notes and holding them for the length it says on the score. But the fellow had nothing to say. Sinatra, a couple of years shy of eighty, could still make you believe he was a cocky punk, scraping a living along the Maine coast, contemplating the birth of his first child. He liked the grit of the song:

...no fat-bottomed, flabby-faced,
Pot-bellied, baggy-eyed bastard
Will boss him around!

And I'm damned if he'll marry the boss's daughter
A skinny-lipped virgin with blood like water...

But, when the song switches from some roughneck tyke of a son to a little girl, he also wrings all the aching loveliness out of Rodgers' melody:

My little girl
Pink and white
As peaches and cream is she...

If I had to pick a favorite Sinatra "Soliloquy" I'd choose the ten-minute version on Sinatra 80th Live In Concert, released by Capitol in December 1995. The old man turns in a cracking performance - and by then he was the only guy to sing the whole thing, including a passage they don't even do in the show anymore:

When I have a daughter
I'll stand around in barrooms
Oh, how I'll boast and blow
Friends will see me coming
And they'll empty all the barrooms...

That particularly fine rendering seems to be unavailable on the Internet, but this live version from roughly the same period on stage in Atlantic City certainly conveys Sinatra's great lifelong love of this piece:

With most of the standard repertoire, Sinatra eschewed corny stand-and-deliver big finishes, placing the climactic open-voweled high-note three-quarters of the way in and preferring to land softly, as he does in "I've Got You Under My Skin" and a hundred others. But in his act he always liked to have what they call a real collar-popper and the big final note of "Soliloquy" – "...or DIE!!!" – stayed in his act till the very end. "I just wish more performers would do it," he said. "If they had the guts, they've got the talent and big voices, but nobody does that." Sinatra's remains the only successful version of the piece outside the show, and that septuagenarian take on a young man unprepared for fatherhood is full of wonder and insight.

Still, it's Father's Day. So let's close with a father and child - in this case, the man who introduced the song, John Raitt, and his rocker daughter Bonnie, on David Letterman's TV show. The running joke of the evening is that Letterman keeps singing showtunes to which he can't quite recall the lyrics, at which point enter the master. And don't worry, they get to the "Soliloquy" right at the end. Happy Father's Day - and I hope your kids show you the love and affection Bonnie Raitt does here:

~adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season. You can order your personally autographed copy exclusively from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Steyn Clubber don't forget to enter your promotional code at checkout for special member pricing. If you're one of the instant gratification crowd, you can always pick it up in eBook, at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indigo-Chapters in Canada, and worldwide.

For more on The Mark Steyn Club, see here. As we always say, membership isn't for everybody, and it doesn't affect access to Song of the Week and our other regular content, but one thing it does give you is commenter's privileges, so get to it!

Don't forget that the audio edition of Steyn's Song of the Week airs thrice weekly on Serenade Radio in the UK, one or other of which broadcasts is certain to be convenient for whichever part of the world you're in:

5.30pm Sunday London (12.30pm New York)

5.30am Monday London (4.30pm Sydney)

9pm Thursday London (1pm Vancouver)

Whichever you prefer, you can listen from anywhere on the planet right here.

Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we've done the same for our musical features. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Liza Minnelli to Loudon Wainwright III; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's lyrics, John Barry's Bond themes, sunshine songs from the Sunshine State, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from the woes of the world.