My Desert Island Discs Trivia Quiz

Answer: Candy

Dinah Shore also had success with this Mack Gordon song, which has become a Jazz standard. For example, the American trumpeter Chet Baker included "Candy" on his 1985 album of the same name.

"Honeysuckle Rose is a Jazz standard composed by Fats Waller in 1929 with lyrics by Andy Razaf.

Although the 1967 release "Incense and Peppermints" by psychedelic band Strawberry Alarm clock is credited to John S. Carter and Tim Gilbert, the song is thought to be based on an instrumental idea by band members Mark Weitz and Ed King. The single peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 but failed to chart in Britain.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richard wrote the Blues Rock song "Brown Sugar", included on The Rolling Stones' 1971 album "Sticky Fingers". Released as a single, the song peaked at number two in the UK and at number one in the U.S.

Answer: Old Devil Moon

With book by E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, lyrics by Harburg and music by Burton Lane, "Finian's Rainbow" might be said to be a fairy tale with a social message. It opened on Broadway on January 10, 1947 and ran for 725 performances. It remains popular with national, regional and community theater companies.

Several of the songs were popular at the time with "Old Devil Moon" becoming a Jazz standard. The London production was less successful, running for only fifty-five performances. I can't say this is surprising since the subject matter of the play - racism and the struggle against it together with the pursuit of that elusive yet alluring phantasm, the American Dream - seems to me to be quintessentially American.

Francis Ford Coppola brought a film adaptation of "Finian's Rainbow" to the big screen, starring Fred Astaire in his last singing and dancing role as the peripatetic Finian McLonergan, Petula Clark as his daughter Sharon, Tommy Steele as Og the leprechaun and Don Franks as Woody Mahoney, leader of the racially integrated sharecroppers' cooperative of Rainbow Valley, Missitucky. Sad to say, the musical's message of love and resistance to bigotry was as relevant in 1968 as it had been in 1947.

On a personal note, "Finian's Rainbow" is my favorite movie of all time. In particular, I've always loved the lush, romantic arrangement of "Old Devil Moon" that showcases the wonderful voices of Don Franks and Petula Clark.

"Moon Over Miami" was written in 1935 by songwriters Joe Burke and Edgar Leslie.

"The Moon of Manakoora" with lyrics by Frank Loesser and music by Alfred Newman was written for Dorothy Lamour in the 1937 film "Hurricane".

The Patty Page favorite "Allegheny Moon" was written in 1956 by Al Hoffman and Dick Manning.

Answer: Nothing In This World

"Nothing in This World" is on Engelbert's 2001 CDs "It's All in the Game" and "Engelbert At His Very Best" as well as the same year's concert DVD release "Engelbert Live At the London Palladium."

Written in 1944 by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, "Out of This World" is a Jazz standard recorded by the likes of Jo Stafford, Bing Crosby, Tony Bennett, Chris Connor, Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Tormé, Mark Murphy and Sammy Davis Jr.

The Paul McCartney penned "A World without Love" was the debut single for British duo Peter and Gordon, issued in February of 1964. Reaching number one on various charts around the world including the UK and the U.S., the song is an enduring favorite.

"My World Is Empty without You" was written by the Motown powerhouse team of Holland-Dozier-Holland in 1965 for The Supremes. The single peaked at number ten on the Billboard R&B chart and at number five on the Hot 100. It did not chart in the UK.

Answer: Laughter In The Rain

Though Neil Sedaka's last U.S. top ten hit had been in 1962 (before the full impact of the British Invasion), he had remained popular in the UK, recording with 10 CC and performing on "Top of the Pops". An album called "Laughter in the Rain" and its eponymous lead single (music by Sedaka and lyrics by Phil Cody), with "Kiddio" on the B-side, were issued there in the spring and summer of 1974. The single spent nine weeks on the charts, reaching its peak, number 15, on June 22, the date the album entered the charts. In turn, the album had a chart run of ten weeks and peaked at number one.

In October 1974, "Laughter in the Rain" was released in the States with "Endlessly" on the B-side. It became Neil's comeback hit, reaching number one on both the Hot 100 and the Adult Contemporary chart and returning him firmly to the top of the American Pop and Soft Rock scene. Shortly after the release of the single came an album, "Sedaka's Back". Essentially a compilation, "Sedaka's Back" included material from his previous three British albums including "Laughter in the Rain". It went gold and peaked at a respectable number 23 on the Top 200.

The other choices are all also from the Sedaka catalog: "The Closest Thing to Heaven" (1964) inexplicably stalled at number 107 on the Billboard chart. "Summertime Madness" is from Neil's 1981 album "Neil Sedaka Now". "My Athena" appears on the 1995 album "Tuneweaver".

Answer: Love Will Keep Us Together

Though The Captain & Tennille is not one of my favorite acts, nonetheless I love this record of theirs, it is so infectiously happy and energizing.

Hard though it is to believe "Love Will Keep Us Together", the last song Neil Sedaka wrote with longtime lyricist Howard Greenfield, was the first song for which Neil won a songwriting Grammy.

Answer: Slow Train

Michael and Donald wrote "The Slow Train" in July 1963, as British Rail had begun to reduce service and abandon lines. It is largely a list of picturesque place names. Yet, with its elegiac tone, that has been likened to that of one of my favorite poems, Edward Thomas' 1914 "Adlestrop" (also inspired by a rural railway station), Michael's lyric evokes a slower, vanishing way of life, while Donald's simple, sad melody with its chugging rhythm provides the perfect accompaniment.

Answer: More Today Than Yesterday

In 1969 The Spiral Staircase, a group from Sacramento, California, reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 with "More Today Than Yesterday" written by Patrick Upton, the group's lead vocalist. Andy covered the song on his album "Get Together with Andy Williams" released later that year. His choice proved prescient because, although "More Today Than Yesterday" was Spiral Staircase's only hit, it has become an enduring favorite.

The other choices are also from the 1960s: "Yesterday When I Was Young" was written in 1964 by Charles Aznavour and Georges Garvarentz. Armando Manzanero gave us "Yesterday I Heard The Rain" in 1968, while "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday" was written in 1969 by Ron Miller and Bryan Wells.

Answer: "Adios" by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra

"Adios" was written and first released by Enrique Madriguera & His Rumba Orchestra in April 1931. The Miller outfit recorded Jerry Gray's arrangement on June 25, 1941 and it was released the next month with "Under Blue Canadian Skies" on the other side.

None of the other tunes listed were closing themes. Goodman closed with "Goodbye", while The Casa Loma Orchestra and TD each used their signature tune to open and close their shows.

Answer: "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Because of its length, Prof. Tolkien's tale was initially published in three volumes ("The Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King") over 1954 and '55, leading to the mistaken classification of it as a trilogy. Since space in my box is at a premium, I'll be packing a one-volume edition.

"Ptolemy's Gate", published in 2005, is the third volume of Jonathan Stroud's "Bartimaeus Trilogy", set in an alternate universe where magic is used to control the populous.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", published in 2007, concludes J.K. Rowling's seven-volume series about the boy wizard's struggle against the evil Lord Voldemort.

"Unnatural Issue", 2011, is the sixth (or seventh, depending how you count them) volume in Mercedes Lackey's "Elemental Masters" series. Inspired by Charles Perault's tale "Donkey Skin", "Unnatural Issue" follows the adventures of Earth master Susan Whitestone as she flees the unnatural attentions of her own father.

Answer: A good mattress

Humans have been sleeping on mats and pallets for a long time. In fact, the oldest known bedding, sleeping mats made from a type of evergreen foliage that repels mosquitoes, was discovered in a cave and is thought to be some seventy-seven thousand years old. But the mattress as we know it didn't develop till quite recently.

In the Eighteenth Century, coconut fiber, cotton, wool and horsehair (rather than straw, peapods and the like) became established as mattress fillings. Not only did this change probably improve comfort levels, it also considerably cut down on bugs and other vermin. Moreover, mattress covers were now routinely made from linen or cotton rather than coarse sacking or rough ticking, and buttons or tufting were used to keep the cover together. But things didn't really get going until German inventor Heinrich Westphal invented the innerspring mattress in 1871. Then, in 1900, engineer James Marshall invented the coil-springs that bear his name, "Marshall Coils". Twenty-six years later, John Dunlop's vulcanized rubber latex foam became available for mattresses. In the 1930s, as innerspring mattresses became more common, so did the use of artificial fillings and the next innovation, encased coil spring mattresses. This advance in sleeping technology consisted of individual springs sewn into linked fabric bags, such that a spring depressed in one area of the mattress would not cause the entire mattress or another area of it to be depressed. Finally, a person could get a good night's sleep on a sturdy, comfortable mattress!

There are other branches of sleep facilitation technology - waterbeds, air mattresses, memory-foam. But I'm taking a nice, firm pocket sprung mattress.

Working on the assumption that my desert island will be a tropical one, a coverlet probably won't be necessary. But, if it came down to it, I could probably pack a coverlet or light blanket with the mattress. Shhh...

One thing I won't be sorry to leave behind is alarm clocks. Means of keeping track of time's passage, such as sundials and water clocks, have been in use for centuries, if not millennia; but the first practical devices we would recognize as mechanical clocks are thought to have been tower clocks built in the region spanning northern Italy to southern Germany from around 1270 to 1300. They did not have faces or hands, but rather were weight-driven devices that chimed the hours.

That infernal device, the alarm clock, is believed to have first seen the light of day in Fifteenth Century Germany. Easing the morning shock just a bit, the clock radio entered our lives in the Twentieth Century. Though accounts of when the first clock radio was invented differ wildly from the 1920s to the 1940s, it is an established fact that Sony introduced its Dream Machine (the first digital clock radio) in 1968. Today the clock radio has been refined to the point of the CD clock radio, which can wake you with an old fashioned alarm, with your favorite radio station or a track of your choice from your favorite CD.

A white noise machine wouldn't be necessary, since I'd probably be sleeping within earshot of the original white noise machine, the sea. Some white noise machines include a nightlight function, with a choice of soothing colors for the light. Again, that won't be necessary in this case, since I'll have the whole Milky Way for a nightlight.