`Some of you young folks been sayin' to me: `Hey Pops - what you mean, What a Wonderful World? How 'bout all them wars all over the place - you call them wonderful? And how 'bout hunger, and pollution - they ain't so wonderful either.'
"But how 'bout listening to ol' Pops for a minute: seems to me, it ain't the world that's so bad, it's what we're doing to it . . . Love, baby, love, that's the secret, yeesssss . . ."
As a creed for the new millennium, we could do worse than Louis Armstrong's patter. And while, for me, the turn of the century don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, the calendar has proved a good excuse for gorgeous looks (and listens) backwards.
The second episode of Joe Jackson's pre-millennial People Get Ready (RTE Radio 1, Friday) is one that will stay near my tape deck this year, for its stunning music and for Jackson's blunt appraisals of its significance.
Hey, Joe, what do you think about the jazz buffs who reckon Armstrong went into decline after the 1920s? "That's total bullshit, the worst sort of fascistic nonsense." (I think Joe slipped a redundant "in my opinion" in there somewhere.) What about the blacks who accused Louis of being an "Uncle Tom"? "He was far more revolutionary than they were . . ." Loving his social history, Jackson is uneven in his adherence to the jazz tradition of naming the musicians on a given track; the RTE website for the show performs a vital service by including a song list and recommended albums, but for the likes of Armstrong it should be beefed up to tell us which versions we've listened to. (I'd especially like to track down the incredible, funereal Black and Tan Fantasy with Duke Ellington.)
But this was Jackson's tribute to Armstrong, "a healthy blend of the earthy and the angelic, the base and the sublime". (Healthy? Pimping and beating women figured prominently in his life - you told us, Joe.) "He turned adversity into opportunity, negative energy into art. Let's face it - it's impossible not to love this guy." In the end, it was credible to suggest that Armstrong managed to - as my own ol' Pops used to say - "subvert and survive". Jackson played us one of his multi-layered wisecracks from the 1950s, in which Armstrong, having recalled the pleasure of working with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in High Society, told us about "my man Raymond Massey". Massey, he said, after his last Broadway performance as Abraham Lincoln, "got so carried away he went up to Harlem and done freed the girls at the Cotton Club".
So who said this? "Such an investigation would require a greater knowledge of cultural history than I possess, and a great readiness to use its language than I could ever muster."
No prizes for guessing it's not Joe Jackson. The characteristic excessive modesty is the property of Seamus Heaney, who in this case is being just a tad defensive.
The forum was BBC Radio 3's amazing Sounding the Century mega-series, and the programme confusingly titled Viewing the Century: Seamus Heaney (Sunday). The defensiveness might have had something to do with the lecture's prior billing, which promised to be Heaney's response to Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen", the Irish poet's assertion of poetry's centrality to the ideological battles of the century.
Which, in all fairness, it wasn't. Apparently for the reasons outlined by Heaney in the quote above, this mellifluous talk referred only passingly to Garcia Lorca, and still-more-fleetingly to Neruda, Brecht and Ginsberg. "Ethnic minority" poets had to settle for this collective label-check.
Heaney's excitement was really reserved for poetry itself, and for the writers whose act of resistence is the creation of their poems and the living of theirs lives as poets. It's no small act, in some cases: Heaney was powerfully moving in his evocation of Osip Mandelstam's artistic survival - his loyalty to his own inner voice and the sonorities of the Russian language - in the face of Stalinist directives.
As Heaney put it himself: "What I've stuck to is a demonstration of the intrinsic strengths and nurtures which poetry provides as an art and a way of knowledge in itself." This meant lots of what Heaney communicates so well: an appreciation of the emotional and existential nuance lodged in the seemingly technical tools of the form. He quoted T S Eliot wondering about writing poetry in wartime, but continued, rather approvingly: "No such doubts assailed W B Yeats as he sat in his tower during the Irish Civil War . . ."
The Heaney ideal as enunciated here is not exactly about transcendence of the wider world - to which the poet must, he says, respond; however, undoubtedly the community to which this lecture most readily harkened is the small one of poets themselves. It's no accident that he started and ended the programme with poems about the death of poets: Auden reading In Memory of W B Yeats to start with, and his own achingly sweet Audenesque, in memory of Joseph Brodsky, to finish off.
With Gaybo gone but not forgotten, listeners were offered a wee glimpse into the great man's private life in The VIP Suite (RTE Radio 1, Sunday). Gloria Hunniford, whose name keeps cropping up in the continuing succession stakes, had as her guest Kathleen Watkins - and the interviewer launched Watkins straight into a chat about the post-retirement joys of life with Byrne.
To the traditional "isn't he under your feet all day?" query, Watkins offered not the pleasures of Gay's company but the fact of his daily disappearance over the Hill of Howth. And their frequent escapes to Donegal are, it seems, filled with excursions and sociable evenings with friends.
Gay's retro-charm was captured in his wife's description of those evenings, full of drink, chat and the dying art of the "party piece". Byrne's, it seems, is called Joyce the Librarian, accompanied by himself on the piano.
Could Kathleen share a lyric or two with us? Not at all, she explained, it's far too "risque".
Oh, dear. Will we ever see his likes again?
