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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Dave Davies.
Cheers.
Bob Weir, the guitarist singer, songwriter and founding member of the Grateful Dead, died recently at the age of 78.
The Dead were a unique phenomenon of rock and roll.
Spawned by a chance meeting between Weir and Jerry Garcia on New Year's Eve in 1963, The band did plenty of recording, but was probably best known for its long, improvisational concerts, attended by dedicated followers who traveled on the band's tour route and camped out at multiple shows.
While Jerry Garcia was the band's lead guitarist and singer, Weir became known for his inventive rhythm guitar.
Bob Pirellas of the New York Times wrote that Weir strummed his rhythm chords lightly, nimbly and malleably – charting and shaping the ever-shifting undercurrents of the Dead's songs and jams.
While the band officially ended with Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, surviving members continued playing their songs in new groups, including Dead and Company.
Weir and the other members of the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, given a Lifetime Achievement, Grammy Award in 2007 and named Kennedy Center honorees in 2024.
Bob Weir continued to play his own music and was on our show in 2016, when he'd released his first album of original songs in 30 years, titled Blue Mountain.
Many of the songs were co-written with Josh Ritter.
Weir said the album was inspired by the time when, as a teen, he ran away to work on a cattle ranch in Wyoming.
The ranch was owned by the parents of John Perry Barlow, who later became Weir's songwriting partner.
Weir spoke with Fresh Air's Sam Brigger and they started with the opening track from the album called Only a River.
I was born up in the mountains, Raised up in a desert town, And I never saw the ocean Till I was close to your.
Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you.
Hey hey, hey you rolling river.
Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you.
Hey hey, hey.
Only you're ever gonna make things right.
Only you're ever gonna make things right.
Only you're ever gonna.
You said that this album was inspired by a summer when you ran away to become a cowboy in Wyoming.
How old were you?
I was 15.
So did you already know how to ride?
Were you herding cattle?
Yeah, when I was a little kid my folks were sort of in the horsey community and also we used to vacation up in Squaw Valley, which in the wintertime was in California.
Here in the wintertime it was a ski resort, in the summertime it was a cattle ranch.
And during the summers, when we were up there, there was a riding stable that we spent a lot of time at.
And the old cowboys who ran the riding stable.
A couple of them took a shine to me and sort of taught me how to ride and some of the basic skills of cowboying.
You know how to cut cattle and stuff like that.
I never did really learn how to rope very well.
But by the time I was 9 or 10, I had a pretty good grasp of the basics.
Through your career, you've seemed to be drawn to cowboy and country songs.
Some of them you've written, like Mexicali Blues.
And then you've also covered a lot of songs like Me and My Uncle, Marty Robbins' song El Paso.
You've also done songs like Johnny Cash's Big River.
Why do you think you're drawn to those tunes?
I've actually wondered that myself.
It occurs to me that I lived that lifestyle for a little bit, not just that summer, but I'd go back out there and work with Barlow.
Part of working with Barlow when I was...
Doing that was we'd live on the ranch, and we had the ranch to run.
And if I helped out, we'd have more time to write.
So I spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff and I kind of got steeped in that tradition a little bit.
And also for what it's worth.
When I was a kid living there, in the bunkhouse there were, you know, in the evening the old boys would pop a cork and they'd tell stories and sing songs.
And I was the kid with the guitar, so I was their accompaniment.
And so I learned a bunch of that stuff and, as I say, got steeped in that tradition.
And I just sort of carried it around in my hip pocket for the rest of my days.
But it's not so much the songs that stuck with me as the delivery and particularly the storytelling aspect of singing those songs or putting them across.
Well, I wanted to ask you about that because I've noticed that it feels like you like songs that have a narrative to them.
A lot of your songs.
They tell us some kind of a story which I think contrasts with the other main songwriting team of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and Robin Hunter.
Their songs were often like impressionistic.
They would generally like evoke a mood or something.
Whereas when I listen to your songs, I find myself imagining a specific narrator character.
Do you think that's true?
Well, that's kind of my approach.
That's what I'm most comfortable with.
For years, I've held forth with the opinion that every artist of any stripe is first and foremost a storyteller.
And the story can be impressionistic or it can be linear in nature.
And I'm comfortable with either of them, though When I set pen to paper, more often than not it comes out more or less linear.
I see songs, as little movies, short movies, and I try to let the characters as fully as possible express themselves and let the story develop so that there's intrigue and all that kind of stuff.
So you have a song on the new album Blue Mountain that's called Kaibasi, which is about 12-step meetings and addiction.
You know, the Grateful Dead had a long and intense history with drugs.
Like the band got its break as the house band for Ken Kesey's acid tests.
And ever since then, the dead had been linked to psychedelics.
And you know you've been forthright saying that for a time LSD was very informative to your way of thinking.
But you know there's also.
There was a lot of tragedy around drugs and alcohol in the Grateful Dead.
Band members, you know, either died from overdose, like like Brent Midland, or from drug or alcohol related illnesses, like Pigpen.
And of course, Jerry Garcia.
And I'm not really sure what my question is, but I guess I was thinking about all that history and we'll listen to that song.
And I was wondering how it might have informed the way you wrote it.
Christ, i don't know how to address that.
Um well, i can't deny that i had a fair bit of uh, you know, either personal experience with uh with drugs, alcohol or whatever or um, close friends of mine had intense experiences with them.
Um, so i kind of i guess i know what i'm talking about to some degree when uh when, I'm helping a character flesh himself out in that regard.
Bob Weir speaking with Sam Brigger, recorded in 2016.
We'll hear more after this short break.
This is Fresh Air.
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Let's get back to Weir's 2016 interview with Fresh Air's Sam Brigger.
While they were talking, they listened to the Dead's song Sugar Magnolia, which Weir co-wrote.
Sugar Magnolia Sugar Magnolia We can have high times if you look back.
We can discover the wonders of nature.
Rolling in the rushes down by the riverside.
When I speak.
When The Grateful Dead started playing, you were 17 years old and you lived on Ashbury Street at the height of the counterculture in San Francisco.
And The Grateful Dead and its music was really at the heart of that movement in a lot of ways.
You know, at 17, were you prepared for that?
It seems like such a young age to have all that thrust upon you.
I was ready for anything.
Come on.
I was 17, 18, and the Haight-Ashborough was popping.
Now, this was the summer of 66, spring and summer of 66.
That was the real summer of love, the 67.
The media made it into something that we didn't recognize and called attention to it.
Everything that had rattled loose in the rest of the country ended up in the Haight-Ashbury.
Things went kind of sideways there by then.
But in 66, the Haight-Ashbury was a youth ghetto, but it was a joyful place.
You were adopted when you were born and you met your birth parents pretty late in life, when you were around 50 years old.
And I guess you had a close relationship with your father until he died last year.
What did you learn about yourself from finally getting to meet him?
Well, for instance, little things like I always go outdoors to clip my fingernails and toenails, and he did too.
Wow.
Um, there are little mannerisms that uh, that you would think that would be, you'd pick up by watching, but they were there.
We, we walked, we carried ourselves the same way.
We had the same sort of sense of humor, um, that kind of thing.
He was a gentleman.
Uh, he was an innate gentleman.
And, uh, and I think of myself as, as such as, as well.
And he had, uh, quality of leadership.
He was basically born to it and people always relied on him for it.
And I've found that that's more or less come my way as well.
You know, it's a gig.
Everybody has to have one.
And people look to me for leadership a lot.
It's just something that I can provide.
It's not something that I want.
I'd rather people left me alone in that regard.
But someone's got to do it.
So over the years, you must have imagined what your birth parents were like.
How did that compare to actually meeting them?
As it turns out, my dad, he had no idea I existed to begin with.
He'd had an affair with a girl in Tucson where they were going to school.
And she got pregnant and very quietly slipped away and had me in San Francisco, the famous liberal city back then, and then came back and never let on that anything had happened.
And so when we met, you know, it was a big surprise to both of them.
Now, I found out about his existence later.
My birth mother after my adopted parents.
A number of years after my adopted parents had checked out, she contacted me because I'd tried to find her and it was not possible.
So she ended up contacting me and she had 12 other kids.
So I didn't feel like I needed to complicate her life all that much.
Mm-hmm.
But we kept in touch and I'd call her on Mother's Day and every now and again we'd see each other and stuff like that.
I'd send her flowers, that kind of thing.
But she gave me my birth father's information last she knew of it.
And he was...
A guy named Jack Parber, and he had been a student at University of Arizona.
And so I got a private eye.
Within about 10 minutes he turned out the information that he was the commanding officer at our local Air Force base.
Hmm.
And I sort of packed that under my pillow for a few years because I'm pathologically anti-authoritarian.
And I didn't figure that I needed the rejection that I was sure to find from this guy, who's probably some sort of military authoritarian kind of guy.
Then, not long after Jerry checked out, my curiosity disappeared, got to the point where I couldn't live with it anymore.
And so I had to find that out.
And so, you know, I figured I had three choices.
I could drive up to his house in Novato, up north of where I live you know about oh, maybe eight, ten miles as a crow flies from where I live, and just knock on his door.
And I figured okay, I don't want my first and last vision of my father, watching him clutch his heart and fall over backwards.
I figured I could write him a letter, but he might crumble that up and throw it away.
So I figured, okay, I'll call him.
And so I did.
And he was on another line.
I was disturbing him at the time.
I said, listen, can you call back in 10 minutes?
I told him, listen, I'm My name is Robert Weir and I live in Mill Valley and I've been doing some research and turned up some information that might be of considerable interest to you.
And he said, okay, well, I'm on another line right now.
Can you call me back in 10 minutes?
And so that was a long 10 minutes.
I called him back and said can I ask you a question or two regarding certain events that took place in Tucson 50 years ago?
And he got real quiet.
And he said, well, okay.
And I said well, did you know, and were you perhaps romantically involved with a young lady by the name of Phyllis back in that time?
And he said, well, and he was alone.
I could kind of hear it over the phone.
He said, well, yeah.
And I said okay well sir, I don't know how many kids you have, but there's a strong connection, a strong likelihood that you have one more than you know.
And he got real quiet.
And then he said okay, the only Bob Worthen I know of is this guy who sings and plays with the Grateful Dead.
Apparently his kids were fans.
And I said, well, sir, that would be me.
And then he got quiet again.
And we talked for a little while and then we met the next day for lunch at both of our favorite Mexican restaurant here in Marin County and we got real tight, real fast.
There's a touching story that one of his sons, I think, died of spinal cancer.
Yeah.
But he was a musician too.
Yeah.
And the family gave you that guitar, and for a long time you would play that guitar on stage, right?
Yeah.
It finally got stolen.
Oh, it did?
Oh, that's terrible.
Yeah.
The son was a Grateful Dead fan, wasn't he?
Well, all four of his sons were Grateful Dead fans, though the one who I never met was probably the least a Grateful Dead fan.
He was more on his own.
He was...
Kind of into that country-esque style of music that was real popular back in the 70s.
He was a flashy but good Telecaster player.
You and Jerry Garcia were the two lead singers of The Grateful Dead.
And he died in 1995.
And you've said before that he was like an older brother to you.
At some point, you started singing his songs in shows.
Was that tough for you?
Was that an easy decision to make?
Or was it hard for you to sing those songs at first?
No, actually, it was a while before I decided I was going to go ahead and do it.
I just had to feel it out.
I knew it was coming, but I didn't know when.
So I just waited until the time was right.
Early on with Rat Dog, after Jerry checked out, I didn't do much Grateful Dead material at all.
I did as little as I could to still keep people coming in the doors.
But I wasn't quite ready to go back there.
And it's not an emotional sort of deal.
I guess there was a little of that involved.
But I just wanted to take a pause.
It just seemed like I ought to.
And then when I started doing it again, slowly all the songs came and one by one they just sort of demanded that okay, it's time.
I've got to breathe again, and you can help me do this.
And so I went with it.
Well, Bob, thanks so much for speaking with us.
Well, thank you.
Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, speaking with Fresh Air's Sam Brigger, recorded in 2016.
Weir died recently at the age of 78.
Coming up, we remember singer Rebecca Kilgore, a talented interpreter of American popular song.
I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Crazy rooster crowing midnight Balls of lightning roll along Old men sing about their dreams.
Women laugh and children scream.
And the band keeps playing on.
Keep on dancing.
Keep on dancing.
Keep on dancing.
Keep on dancing.
Keep on dancing.
Keep on dancing.
Keep on dancing.
Keep on dancing.
Come on, children.
Come on, children.
Come on, clap your hands.
Well, the cool breeze came on Tuesday.
And the corn's a bumper crop.
And the fields are full of dancing, full of singing and romancing.
The music never stops.
Next we're going to remember singer Rebecca Kilgore, a devoted interpreter of American popular song, who died last week at the age of 76.
You may have heard her in concert on the show, often with pianist Dave Frishberg.
Terry's joined us to share some thoughts of her own about what makes Rebecca Kilgore special.
Terry?
Thanks, Dave.
I think Becky did more concerts on our show than any other performer.
Her repertoire was American popular song, dating as far back as the 1930s.
She performed with songwriter, pianist and singer Dave Frishberg in the 90s at the Heathman Hotel in Portland Oregon.
They both lived there.
And that enabled her to quit her job as a secretary at Reed College and have a real music career, recording many albums and performing around the world.
It was great to record her for our show because she was always right on pitch, which meant we didn't need to do a lot of takes.
It was her sense of rhythm that I loved most.
She had such a natural sense of swing.
I loved her for singing relatively obscure songs and reviving songs I'd never heard of.
She struck me as kind of shy, but that may have contributed to another trait I loved.
She called attention to the song and not herself.
She didn't try to impress you with like high notes or dizzying scat singing.
She knew how to bring a song to life and fill them with her delight in singing them.
Becky died of Lewy body disease, and that has symptoms similar to Alzheimer's.
And Dave Frishberg died of Alzheimer's in 2021.
I always describe Becky as one of my favorite living singers and I feel so lucky to have gotten the chance to work with her and to showcase her singing on our show.
Rest in peace, Becky.
Thanks, Terry.
In 1995, Rebecca Kilgore first appeared on our show with Dave Frishberg at the piano.
They opened their concert with a song from 1933 by Harold Arlen and Ted Kohler.
Piano plays I got my trousers pressed, shoes shined.
I had my coat and vest relined.
Take a look at my lapel, see the flower, can't you tell?
I'm happy as the day is long, haven't got a dime to lend.
I got a lot of time to spend, just a pocket full of air, feeling like a millionaire.
I'm happy as the day is long, got a heavy affair, and I'm having my fun.
Am I walking on air?
Gee, but I'm the lucky one.
I got my peace of mind.
Knock wood, I hear that love is blind.
That's good, cause the things I never see never seem to worry me.
I'm happy as the day is long.
I'm happy, happy, happy as the day is long.
So happy, happy as the day is long.
Got a heavy affair and I'm having my fun.
Am I walking on air?
Gee, but I'm the lucky one.
I've got my peace of mind.
Knock wood, I hear that love is blind.
That's good, because the things I never see never seem to worry me.
I'm happy as the day is long.
I'm happy as the day is long.
Wonderful.
And that's Rebecca Kilgore singing with Dave Frishberg at the piano.
Becky, welcome to Fresh Air.
This has been an ambition of mine for a long time to have you sing on the show, and I'm delighted that we're actually doing it.
It's remarkable to me that you can sing as wonderfully as you do and yet, having you started so late professionally, to actually sing in front of people.
That's right, but I was a closet singer before that, so I had lots of practice in my own living room.
You gave up your day job, what, just a couple of years ago?
That's correct.
Actually, two and a half.
What was the turning point to give it up?
I was working full time and it was getting to be too much with all the gigs I had at night.
And it was clear that I had to make a decision.
And I had the support of my boss and my colleagues and they said, yes, do it.
So I quit my secretarial job.
Equally remarkable to me is that you didn't even sing in front of people until what you were 30, 31.
That's right.
Do you have a good musical memory when you're trying to learn a song?
Do you get it the first time?
No, I wish I did, and that's boy.
I wish I could just learn a song immediately.
But I have to painstakingly play the melody on my guitar and sing along with it and read the notes and then read the lyrics and listen to it.
So I absorb it both with sight, sound and playing it physically on the guitar.
It's a tedious procedure.
Say you're learning a melody that has a difficult interval.
What's your idea of a difficult melody to learn?
Well, Lush Life comes to mind, although I've never sung it and I don't even have any aspirations of singing it.
Ballerina.
Ballerina.
Oh boy, that took me a long time to learn.
That's ballerina dance.
Do your pirouette in rhythm with your aching heart.
Dance ballerina, dance.
You mustn't once forget A dancer has to dance the part.
See what I mean.
No, what makes that tricky?
Because there's a lot of odd intervals and quick notes.
What's an accidental?
It's not in the scale.
It's not in the scale, yeah.
But I think this part those those, all those non-chord tones land on on those big, heavy accented beats and you better hit them, otherwise you just sound awful.
I'm interested in how you started performing together, which you do every week now in in portland.
I came to portland as a like to do my act, you know, at a place called Father's.
And Becky was playing with this band, Holy Cats.
This was about 81, I think, when I first met you, wasn't it?
82, something like that, you know.
So we've known each other quite a long time.
I was knocked out with her then.
She was the guitar player with the band, you know, but she was singing.
She sounded great.
And so you asked her to sing with you?
I mean, how did you start performing?
Well, later on, when I moved to Portland, I was offered this job at the Heathman and they said they wanted a singer, and I thought of Becky.
And Becky, did it change your singing at all to have Dave playing?
I mean, I think he's just a fantastic pianist, and I wonder if you think that that affected you.
It's been the gig of my life.
It's been the greatest gig, and I have the most sympathetic accompanist I could imagine with Dave.
It's just wonderful to have him as an accompanist.
And the other reason is that I get to bring in new songs every week and just put him in front of him and he plays him.
So I get to increase my repertoire by leaps and bounds.
Becky's a good arranger and a good guitar player and she knows how to write a good lead sheet, and it's increased my repertoire.
It's enriched my repertoire quite a bit, too.
On your album, I Saw Stars, you do a lot of songs that I love, and I love the way you do the songs.
So I'm going to request a song from that CD, and this is No Love, No Nothin'.
No love, no nothing, until my baby comes home.
No sir, no nothing.
As long as baby must roam, I promised him I'd wait for him till even Hades froze.
I'm lonesome, heaven knows, but what I said still goes.
No love, no nothing, and that's a promise I'll keep.
No fun with no one.
I'm getting plenty of sleep.
My heart's striking, though it's like an empty honeycomb.
No love, no sir, no nothing till my baby comes home.
Thank you.
But what I said still goes.
No love, no nothing.
And that's a promise I'll keep.
No fun with no one.
I'm getting plenty of sleep.
My heart's on strike and though it's light, An empty honeycomb.
No love, no sir No, nothing till my baby comes home.
No love, no sir, No nothing till my baby comes home.
That's Rebecca Kilgore and Dave Frischberg, recorded in 1995.
She wasn't well-known among the general public, but was a real favorite here at Fresh Air.
She recorded a number of albums by herself and in duet with pianist Dave Frischberg.
In 1999, they recorded a concert of songs by Dorothy Fields.
Well, Dave Becky, why don't you do one of Dorothy Field's actually her first hit?
It was her first hit.
I Can't Give You Anything But Love which, like The Sunny Side of the Street, has music by Jimmy McHugh.
This song caught on after it was featured in the review Lou Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928.
Maybe you can do the verse for us also.
Okay.
Gee, but it's tough to be broke, kid.
It's not a joke, kid.
It's a curse.
My luck is changing.
It's gotten from simply riding to something worse.
Who knows, someday I will win too.
I'll begin to reach my prime.
Now though I see what our end is, All I can spend is just my time.
Oh, I can't give you anything but love, baby.
That's the only thing I've plenty of, baby.
Dream a while, scheme a while.
We're sure to find happiness.
And I guess all those things that you always find for G. I'd love to see you looking swell, baby.
Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn't sell, baby.
Till that lucky day, you know darn well, baby, I can't give you anything but love.
Gee, I'd love to see you looking swell.
Baby diamond bracelet.
Woolworths doesn't sell Baby till that lucky day.
You know darn well.
Baby, I can't give you anything but love.
I can't give you anything but love.
And that song was written, I think, about a year before the Depression and obviously had particular resonance when the Depression hit shortly after.
Becky, do you find Dorothy Field's lyrics particularly singable because they're so colloquial?
You take a line like, gee, I'd like to see you look and swell.
See, I can get into a lyric like that.
I love that.
I'm not embarrassed to say that.
Some corny lyrics I am, but it just sounds, like you say, colloquial and it's fun to say.
Dorothy Fields' trademark as a lyricist is her cleverness, but she could also write really tender lyrics, and I think this song really proves that.
This is The Way You Look Tonight, a ballad that she wrote with Jerome Kern.
It won an Academy Award.
It was written for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film Swing Time.
And you know Dorothy Field said that the first time Jerome Kern played her the melody right before she wrote the lyric for it she thought it was so beautiful that she started to cry and she had to leave the room.
Would you do the song for us?
Sure.
Someday When I'm awfully low, When the world is cold, I will feel aglow Just thinking of you And the way you look tonight.
Oh, but you're lovely, With your smile so warm And your cheeks so soft.
There is nothing for me but to love you Just the way you look tonight.
With each word, Your tenderness grows, Tearing my fear apart.
And that laugh, That wrinkles your nose, Touches my food heart.
Lovely never, never change.
Keep that breathless charm.
Won't you please arrange it, cause I love you just the way you look tonight.
Just the way you look tonight.
Thanks, it's been a pleasure for us.
Thanks, Terri.
Dave Frischberg and Rebecca Kilgore recorded in 1999 as part of our American Popular Song series.
We'll hear more of their performances after a break.
This is Fresh Air.
This is Fresh Air, and we're remembering singer Rebecca Kilgore today.
She died last week at the age of 76.
Later, in 1999, she and Dave Frishberg returned to Fresh Air for a concert of Hoagy Carmichael songs, which was part of our American Popular Song Series.
Well early in Hoagy Carmichael's Hollywood career, when he was a staff songwriter at Paramount Pictures, the studio teamed him up with Frank Lesser.
And Lesser, as a composer and lyricist, is probably best known for writing the songs for Guys and Dolls.
But at the time, he was just getting started as a lyricist.
And so with Hoagy Carmichael, he wrote Small Fry, Heart and Soul, and Two Sleepy People.
I'm going to ask you to do Two Sleepy People.
It was sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in the 1938 movie Thanks for the Memory.
It's a wonderful song.
Would you do it for us?
Yeah.
Sure.
Here we are, Out of cigarettes, Holding hands and yawning.
Look how late it gets.
Two sleepy people by dawn's early light and too much in love to say goodnight.
Here we are in the cozy chair, picking on a wishbone from the fridge today.
Two sleepy people with nothing to say and too much in love to break away.
Do you remember the nights we used to linger in the hall?
Father didn't like you at all.
Do you remember the reason why we married in the fall?
To rent this little nest and get a bit of rest.
Well, here we are, just about the same.
Foggy little fellow.
Drowsy little day.
Two sleepy people by dawn's early light and too much in love to say goodnight.
Well, here we are.
Don't we look a mess?
Lipstick on your collar, wrinkles in my dress.
Two sleepy people who know very well they're too much in love to break the spell.
Here we are, crazy in the head.
Gee, your eyes are gorgeous, even when they're red.
Two sleepy people by dawn's early light, and too much in love to say goodnight.
Do you remember when we went dancing at the Palomar?
When it was over, why naturally we cuddled in the car.
That's when I ran out of gas.
And I was green as grass.
Well, here we are, keeping up the pace.
Letting each tomorrow slap us in the face.
Two sleepy people by dawn's early light.
And too much in love to say goodnight.
I think that's one of the most successfully conversational songs I know, both in the lyric and in the music.
Well, it makes it really easy to sing as a duet that way.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's real.
It's two real people.
Well, the next Hoagy Carmichael song I'd like you to do for us is called The Nearness of You.
And although it's one of his most recorded songs, I don't think it's nearly as well known as his other famous songs like Skylock and Stardust and Rockin' Chair in Georgia.
The lyric is by Ned Washington, who was given Hoagy's melody by the Paramount Studio, and the song was used for the 1938 movie Romance in the Dark.
Would you do The Nearness of You?
Of course.
Sure.
It's not the pale moon that excites me, That thrills and delights me Oh no, it's just the nearness of you.
It isn't your sweet conversation That brings this sensation.
Oh no, It's just the nearness of you.
When you're in my arms And I feel you so close to me, All my wildest dreams come true.
I need no soft lights to enchant me.
If you only grant me the right To hold you ever so tight.
And to feel in the night the nearness of you.
That was lovely.
Singer Rebecca Kilgore with pianist Dave Frischberg recorded in 1999.
Rebecca died last week at the age of 76.
We send our condolences to her family, her friends, and her fans.
That's the thing to do.
Just watch the smoke rings rise in the air.
You'll find your share of happiness there.
So And they might come true.
Things never are as bad as they seem.
On Monday's show we hear from Heather McGee.
Her book The Sum of Us, asks why so many Americans believe that progress for one group means loss for another.
On Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, a conversation about the cost of that belief and who she says is really paying.
I hope you can join us.
Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger.
Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld and Diana Martinez.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V.
Nesper.
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley I'm Dave Davies to do.
Just watch the smoke rings rise in the air.
You'll find your share.
