Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

This will be our last song for a while because Paul Popa is leaving tomorrow, and I am going to give it a rest. But, we decided to go out with a flourish by taking an old jazz standard by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer and spinning it our own way with some jammin' blues. 

The song is Accentuate the Positive from 1944. It was written for a Bing Crosby movie, Here Come the Waves where "Waves" was a reference to females in the Navy. The lyrics were inspired by a sermon he heard as a youth, said Johnny Mercer. The song was nominated for an Academy Award in 1945. It lost to the very beautiful and haunting It Might As Well Be Spring by Rogers and Hammerstein from the musical State Fair which was sung by the gorgeous and dazzling Jeanne Crane. So, that was some tough competition.

Nevertheless, on March 25, 2015, Accentuate the Positive was inducted in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry for the song's "cultural, artistic, and/or historical significance to American society and the nation's audio legacy."  

So, here is Accentuate the Positive as interpreted by Ralph Cinque and Paul Popa, with our thanks to you for listening. 

https://youtu.be/cgTC_wtLTXI