In celebration of the two-year anniversary of Word & Song, we are offering a special rate on paid, gift, and upgraded subscriptions all during July. Keep an eye on your inbox for more specials & announcements. Special Rate to Celebrate! The only air conditioning we ever had when I was growing up was the kind that comes from your pores: sweat, our W…

In celebration of the two-year anniversary of Word & Song on the Fourth of July, we are offering a special rate on paid, gift, and upgraded subscriptions. Check your inboxes through this July for more! Special Rate to Celebrate! When the father in the parable welcomed back home the wayward son, we are told that he kissed the boy and bade his servan…

American popular music was already sizzling in the 1930’s, but even in a hot market Sometimes a Song can become iconic overnight. “Stormy Weather” was such a song, written by a prolific composer whose name few people recognized in his own day and fewer still recognize now. But Harold Arlen was well known and highly respected by professional singers…

Yesterday when I mused upon our Word of the Week, rain, I pointed out that when Jesus says that the Father sends his rain upon the just and the unjust, such rain was a good and blessed thing, because how else are you going to survive in a land as dry as Palestine can be? But now suppose we aren’t talking about the gentle rains that soak the land an…

Ah, this is our week for Man’s Best Friend, the humble and faithful dog. And because you have to search far and wide to find anyone who doesn’t naturally understand the truth of that old and true appellation, it’s not surprising that some of Dogs’ Best Friends have commemorated their canine pals in song or story. We featured one such story about a …

Hollywood has made quite a few films in which the dog is the focus of everything. My favorite is one we’ve featured here at Word and Song: William Wellman’s Goodbye, My Lady, with Walter Brennan and the boy actor Brandon de Wilde and a Basenji girl-dog the boy finds in the woods and trains to be the best birder anybody’s ever seen. And surely The H…

Once again, a Substack glitch plagues us. Today’s poem, from Tony’s excellent book-length poem, The Hundredfold, only went out to a small number of our subscribers. We cannot discover why this happens, but when it does, we resend the post in a new draft. We very much want all of our subscribers to receive what we write — so we are opening this post…