Furloughed on Radio 3

Prior to the current situation I'd only associated the word furlough with wartime G.I.s - over here we called it leave. However, like other Americanisms such as take a rain-check or a ballpark figure, both baseball related expressions, furlough is now a well and truly established buzzword in our UK vocabulary.

Brian Ebbatson tells me that Radio 3, this morning, played a couple of tracks with furlough in the title.

One was A Fellow on a Furlough by Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force band and the second was Furlough Blues by an Earl Hines Big Band in 1945.

Brian, understandably, prefers the Hines disc although the Miller recording has a vocal by Johnny Desmond who, had he been able to dodge the draft with a punctured eardrum, could have been a contender in the 1940's heartthrob stakes. As it was he did earn the title of The Creamer and it wasn't necessarily for his voice!

The Hines disc also has a vocalist. A singer with a deep heavy vibrato not too far removed from Billy Eckstine. Lord Essex was his stage name. Essex? Eckstine? could this have been Mr B using a pseudonym? After all he did start out with the Hines band.

However, further research revealed that "Lord Essex" was actually Scott Essex. The story that got around was that Hines' manager thought Scott Essex sounded too ordinary so he said, "We've got a Duke, a Count and an Earl so let's have a Lord" which put the mockers on my theory!

Still, the research gave me something to do whilst on furlough!*

Lance

*I've actually been furloughed for the past 20 years!