I dedicate my song today to Chand Mahtani who lives in Singapore and who is a very good friend of mine and Sheila.
Today’s song is ‘Let Me Go, Lover’. This song was written by Jenny Lou Carson and Al Hill, a pseudonym used by Fred Wise, Kathleen Twomey, and Ben Weisman. It is based on an earlier song called ‘Let Me Go, Devil’; a song about alcoholism.
'Let Me Go, Lover' was featured on the television programme ’Studio One on November 15, 1954, and caught the fancy of the public. The episode was a murder mystery that revolved around a hit record and a disc jockey. Producer Felix Jackson asked Columbia Records' Mitch Miller for a recording to use in the show, and Miller provided Joan Weber’s version of ‘Let Me Go, Lover’. Miller took advantage of the recording's exposure on national television and sent copies of the record to 2,000 disc-jockeys, who began to play it on their radio stations.
Weber was pregnant when she recorded the song. A result of the program was to illustrate how efficiently a song could be promoted by introducing it to the public via radio or TV production. The recording was released by ‘Columbia Records. Mitch Miller stocked national record stores the week before the program and because of its availability the record sold over 100,000 the first week of its release. It first reached the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chartm on December 4, 1954. By January 1955, Weber's record of the song had hit Number 1 on all the Billboard charts (the Disk Jockey chart, the Best Seller chart, and the Juke Box chart). The song reached Number 16 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’ and was awarded a gold record.
It was also quickly covered by several other singers, including Lucille Ball: Patti Page (1954): Peggy Lee (1954): Hank Snow (1955): Dean Martin (1955): Kathy Kirby (1964) and Billy Fury (1983), shortly before his death.
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As someone who primarily worked with people’s problem situations and inappropriate behaviour all my life, one of the problems that was capable of producing deep and disturbing emotional upset and unbalance was seen in the response pattern of a person who had loved someone profoundly, lost them through either relationship breakup, bereavement or other circumstances beyond their control, but who remained ‘emotionally frozen’ in progressing their life because of their unwillingness and inability to ‘let them go’.
When the person one ‘first loves’ or ‘best loves’ deserts you, the hurt that one feels is magnified ten-fold and one’s world seems to fall asunder. The dumped lover often acts in a bereaved manner and becomes overcome with a sense of loss and falls into a state of depression. It is as if their lover has died on them instead of having dumped them. It is not unusual in these circumstances; particularly where the ending of the relationship was wholly unexpected, for the abandoned person to experience an emotional shock that stuns them into a kind of emotional stagnation where they genuinely believe that they will never trust another man or woman again with their heart that has been broken. Many still hang on to the forlorn possibility in delusional desperation that their lover will eventually see sense and return to them. I have witnessed people with a ‘broken heart’, pine for a loved one for ten years or more.
Then, there are those loving relationships between two lifelong soul mates whose relationship ended when one of the couple sadly died or was taken from them in tragic circumstances. It need not be the relationship between two adults of the opposite or same-sex in a happy marriage but can also be a relationship between a mother and child or between two siblings or best friends.
I have known one twin of two close siblings die, and the remaining twin describes their experience as having a vital limb missing from their body. I once heard of two elder residents in their 80s in a ‘Old Folk’s Home’ whose ‘personality clash’ was evident from the very first day they bumped into each other in the dining room, and which gradually grew over the next decade into something resembling a full-blown vendetta which, ironically, would only end in in the death of one of them.
The staff of the home had to repeatedly separate them when their daily arguments started to become more aggressive and unsettling for other residents. The two old men would often engage in threatened fisticuffs and although a punch was never thrown, they slung insults, curses and the occasional plate at each other like confetti going out of fashion. Neither of the two adversaries ever had a good word to say about the other and would be happy to laugh and jeer at any downfall the other experienced.
The time came when one of the two adversaries caught a cold that confined him to bed. The other seemed to rejoice at the prospect of not seeing him for a week. The cold, however, turned into pneumonia and after three or four days the old man died. The upshot was that on the day of his adversary’s funeral, he went to his room and thereafter refused to leave it. It was as though he’d lost all sense of purpose in life since he no longer had ‘his friend’-‘his enemy’ to daily argue with. It is reported that he also died three months later. The resident doctor said he had died a natural death, but the residential staff believed that a ‘broken heart’ and a ‘profound loss’ was the cause.
A prostitute and mother to three children I once worked with, had her children taken into care during an unstable period of her life. She had left her three young children unattended one night while she walked the streets trying to pick up a punter. During her absence, the oldest child (aged 7 years) started playing with matches and burned down the house. All three children were immediately taken into care.
Over the next three years, I helped Hazel to stop drinking, give up prostituting herself and prepared her to get her three children out of care. I will never forget the look of happiness on her face the day her children were returned to her. For around six months, Hazel was happier than I’d ever seen her. She stayed off the alcohol and became a good mum to her children. She moved to new accommodation in a different area to make a fresh start, and everything seemed rosy.
About four months after Hazel and her family had moved to a different house, her life was once more to witness so much hurt and heartache. A man who had murdered a prostitute in Hong Kong when he’d been a serving soldier, twenty-two years earlier, was released on Life Licence and returned to live with his widowed mother in Almondbury, Huddersfield. Both Hazel and her family lived in the same area as the Life Licensee.
Two months after the man had been released on life licence, he killed again. On the afternoon of the murder, he was completing a jigsaw puzzle with his mother in their front lounge. His mother went to make a pot of tea and realised they were out of milk, so she asked her son to go to the shop for her, which he did. On the way back, the man passed a green park area where he spotted a young boy aged around ten-years-old, playing on his own. The man on Life Licence dragged the young boy to some bushes, sexually assaulted him and then strangled him to death; before returning to his mother’s house with the bottle of milk he’d bought.
Three hours later, whilst making murder enquiries, the police visited his mother’s house. They found both mother and son completing their giant jigsaw puzzle and the man was nonchalantly eating a sandwich and drinking tea. When put to him, he didn’t even deny the murder (which suggested that he’d been inside prison for so long that he could no longer live on the outside of a prison cell).
The young boy killed was Hazel’s 10-year-old son. I recall visiting her home as soon as I learned of the tragic event. Hazel was naturally distraught, couldn’t talk and just sat there sobbing uncontrollably alongside her other children. She was too sad to yet express her outrage and anger. That anger stage was not to come until a few months later.
I attended her son’s funeral and unashamedly cried for the rest of that day. It rained down buckets as we stood around the small graveside. “Oh why, oh why does it always have to bloody rain heavily whenever somebody is being buried?” I asked myself as the coffin was lowered into the wet ground.
For months, Hazel hardly ate a morsel or slept a wink. She started to look like an inmate who’d been confined in ‘Belson Concentration Camp’. She was in fact confined in her own mental and emotional prison, and not surprisingly, Hazel then bordered on an emotional breakdown. She was probably saved from an emotional breakdown by all the anger she had inside her that was bursting to erupt.
When Hazel entered her ‘anger’ stage of the bereavement process, she rediscovered her aggressive behaviour of old. She was angry with the world and all around her and was literally dangerous if argued with. Every sentence would be littered with curses, threats and swear words. Years before I knew Hazel, her records showed that she had scarred her violent partner on his shoulder with the red-hot iron she was using. She had aimed for his face but had fortunately missed, or else the three month’s imprisonment she received would have been three years!
For years after her son’s murder, Hazel dare not let her remaining two younger children out of her sight. I will never forget her telling me, “It has robbed me of all future happiness, Mr Forde. If I am in a café today or at the bus stop and I hear someone laughing, I feel like screaming at them to ‘fucking shut up!’” (Forgive my relating Hazel’s words as precisely as I can remember). Whatever I was able to achieve with Hazel, getting her to refrain from cursing was never to appear on my success card. I did include Hazel in a six-month ‘Anger Management Group Course’ I held for two hours weekly at the Huddersfield Probation Office. Hazel’s turned out to be a star pupil and her progress probably placed her the category of in some of my finest work.
Hazel eventually moved to the Manchester area, and she met a man whom she married. He seemed to act as a good father to her children and the family appeared to taste happiness again. But Hazel could never be the same as she’d been before her son’s murder. The absence of her oldest son from her life had left a huge hole in her heart which could never be healed.
From all the group activities, Hazel engaged in, learning to relax, helped her more than any other. She no longer lost control of her anger and was able to convert her previous thumps to mere curses. The greatest compliment that Hazel paid me, I was to see inside her car. She once proudly showed me Inside the driver’s door. Hazel pulled down the sunscreen visor and there was a photograph of my face she had cellotaped to the inside of the visor. She told me, ‘If ever I swear at some other car driver for cutting me up, Mr Forde, instead of jumping out and punching him, I just look at your photo and remember my breathing exercises. That mug shot of yours is a lifesaver for me!”
I have known and worked with many a bereaved marriage partner who seemed to be emotionally stuck in the past. Many bereaved widows and widowers stay emotionally unattached through ‘choice’ because they know that no other partner could ever match up to the love they lost. Other bereaved partners might like to meet someone else; for either companionship or even marriage, but still find it very hard to re-join the dating scene and emotionally ‘move on’ with their life. Others seem to spend the remainder of their life doing good works and busying themselves daily with all manner of voluntary and good-neighbourly tasks, to the extent that they haven’t time to think and dwell upon what they once had and lost. Some bereaved people find the reliability and the unqualified love of a pet in their lives invaluable in getting themselves out of the house and feeling alive and worthwhile again. When one loses someone they love, helping a pet from a refuge centre is often the precursor to helping a person, and then to helping oneself move on with life.
Whatever the circumstances of the loss, for many people it is virtually impossible for them to ‘let go’ of the person they loved, and for others, it would be intrinsically wrong for them ever to ‘let go’.
I dedicate my song today to Chand Mahtani who lives in Singapore and who is a very good friend of mine and Sheila. A recent Facebook post of Chands on the 11th October 2019, reveals a story, not too dissimilar to the theme of this post. It is about a woman who adopted a kitten after a family tragedy. The bereaved woman eventually concluded that if she could be happy through helping a kitten then imagine how happy she could become through helping people. Have a good day, Chand. Much love from me and Sheila x
Love and peace Bill xxx
Today’s song is ‘Let Me Go, Lover’. This song was written by Jenny Lou Carson and Al Hill, a pseudonym used by Fred Wise, Kathleen Twomey, and Ben Weisman. It is based on an earlier song called ‘Let Me Go, Devil’; a song about alcoholism.
'Let Me Go, Lover' was featured on the television programme ’Studio One on November 15, 1954, and caught the fancy of the public. The episode was a murder mystery that revolved around a hit record and a disc jockey. Producer Felix Jackson asked Columbia Records' Mitch Miller for a recording to use in the show, and Miller provided Joan Weber’s version of ‘Let Me Go, Lover’. Miller took advantage of the recording's exposure on national television and sent copies of the record to 2,000 disc-jockeys, who began to play it on their radio stations.
Weber was pregnant when she recorded the song. A result of the program was to illustrate how efficiently a song could be promoted by introducing it to the public via radio or TV production. The recording was released by ‘Columbia Records. Mitch Miller stocked national record stores the week before the program and because of its availability the record sold over 100,000 the first week of its release. It first reached the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chartm on December 4, 1954. By January 1955, Weber's record of the song had hit Number 1 on all the Billboard charts (the Disk Jockey chart, the Best Seller chart, and the Juke Box chart). The song reached Number 16 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’ and was awarded a gold record.
It was also quickly covered by several other singers, including Lucille Ball: Patti Page (1954): Peggy Lee (1954): Hank Snow (1955): Dean Martin (1955): Kathy Kirby (1964) and Billy Fury (1983), shortly before his death.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
As someone who primarily worked with people’s problem situations and inappropriate behaviour all my life, one of the problems that was capable of producing deep and disturbing emotional upset and unbalance was seen in the response pattern of a person who had loved someone profoundly, lost them through either relationship breakup, bereavement or other circumstances beyond their control, but who remained ‘emotionally frozen’ in progressing their life because of their unwillingness and inability to ‘let them go’.
When the person one ‘first loves’ or ‘best loves’ deserts you, the hurt that one feels is magnified ten-fold and one’s world seems to fall asunder. The dumped lover often acts in a bereaved manner and becomes overcome with a sense of loss and falls into a state of depression. It is as if their lover has died on them instead of having dumped them. It is not unusual in these circumstances; particularly where the ending of the relationship was wholly unexpected, for the abandoned person to experience an emotional shock that stuns them into a kind of emotional stagnation where they genuinely believe that they will never trust another man or woman again with their heart that has been broken. Many still hang on to the forlorn possibility in delusional desperation that their lover will eventually see sense and return to them. I have witnessed people with a ‘broken heart’, pine for a loved one for ten years or more.
Then, there are those loving relationships between two lifelong soul mates whose relationship ended when one of the couple sadly died or was taken from them in tragic circumstances. It need not be the relationship between two adults of the opposite or same-sex in a happy marriage but can also be a relationship between a mother and child or between two siblings or best friends.
I have known one twin of two close siblings die, and the remaining twin describes their experience as having a vital limb missing from their body. I once heard of two elder residents in their 80s in a ‘Old Folk’s Home’ whose ‘personality clash’ was evident from the very first day they bumped into each other in the dining room, and which gradually grew over the next decade into something resembling a full-blown vendetta which, ironically, would only end in in the death of one of them.
The staff of the home had to repeatedly separate them when their daily arguments started to become more aggressive and unsettling for other residents. The two old men would often engage in threatened fisticuffs and although a punch was never thrown, they slung insults, curses and the occasional plate at each other like confetti going out of fashion. Neither of the two adversaries ever had a good word to say about the other and would be happy to laugh and jeer at any downfall the other experienced.
The time came when one of the two adversaries caught a cold that confined him to bed. The other seemed to rejoice at the prospect of not seeing him for a week. The cold, however, turned into pneumonia and after three or four days the old man died. The upshot was that on the day of his adversary’s funeral, he went to his room and thereafter refused to leave it. It was as though he’d lost all sense of purpose in life since he no longer had ‘his friend’-‘his enemy’ to daily argue with. It is reported that he also died three months later. The resident doctor said he had died a natural death, but the residential staff believed that a ‘broken heart’ and a ‘profound loss’ was the cause.
A prostitute and mother to three children I once worked with, had her children taken into care during an unstable period of her life. She had left her three young children unattended one night while she walked the streets trying to pick up a punter. During her absence, the oldest child (aged 7 years) started playing with matches and burned down the house. All three children were immediately taken into care.
Over the next three years, I helped Hazel to stop drinking, give up prostituting herself and prepared her to get her three children out of care. I will never forget the look of happiness on her face the day her children were returned to her. For around six months, Hazel was happier than I’d ever seen her. She stayed off the alcohol and became a good mum to her children. She moved to new accommodation in a different area to make a fresh start, and everything seemed rosy.
About four months after Hazel and her family had moved to a different house, her life was once more to witness so much hurt and heartache. A man who had murdered a prostitute in Hong Kong when he’d been a serving soldier, twenty-two years earlier, was released on Life Licence and returned to live with his widowed mother in Almondbury, Huddersfield. Both Hazel and her family lived in the same area as the Life Licensee.
Two months after the man had been released on life licence, he killed again. On the afternoon of the murder, he was completing a jigsaw puzzle with his mother in their front lounge. His mother went to make a pot of tea and realised they were out of milk, so she asked her son to go to the shop for her, which he did. On the way back, the man passed a green park area where he spotted a young boy aged around ten-years-old, playing on his own. The man on Life Licence dragged the young boy to some bushes, sexually assaulted him and then strangled him to death; before returning to his mother’s house with the bottle of milk he’d bought.
Three hours later, whilst making murder enquiries, the police visited his mother’s house. They found both mother and son completing their giant jigsaw puzzle and the man was nonchalantly eating a sandwich and drinking tea. When put to him, he didn’t even deny the murder (which suggested that he’d been inside prison for so long that he could no longer live on the outside of a prison cell).
The young boy killed was Hazel’s 10-year-old son. I recall visiting her home as soon as I learned of the tragic event. Hazel was naturally distraught, couldn’t talk and just sat there sobbing uncontrollably alongside her other children. She was too sad to yet express her outrage and anger. That anger stage was not to come until a few months later.
I attended her son’s funeral and unashamedly cried for the rest of that day. It rained down buckets as we stood around the small graveside. “Oh why, oh why does it always have to bloody rain heavily whenever somebody is being buried?” I asked myself as the coffin was lowered into the wet ground.
For months, Hazel hardly ate a morsel or slept a wink. She started to look like an inmate who’d been confined in ‘Belson Concentration Camp’. She was in fact confined in her own mental and emotional prison, and not surprisingly, Hazel then bordered on an emotional breakdown. She was probably saved from an emotional breakdown by all the anger she had inside her that was bursting to erupt.
When Hazel entered her ‘anger’ stage of the bereavement process, she rediscovered her aggressive behaviour of old. She was angry with the world and all around her and was literally dangerous if argued with. Every sentence would be littered with curses, threats and swear words. Years before I knew Hazel, her records showed that she had scarred her violent partner on his shoulder with the red-hot iron she was using. She had aimed for his face but had fortunately missed, or else the three month’s imprisonment she received would have been three years!
For years after her son’s murder, Hazel dare not let her remaining two younger children out of her sight. I will never forget her telling me, “It has robbed me of all future happiness, Mr Forde. If I am in a café today or at the bus stop and I hear someone laughing, I feel like screaming at them to ‘fucking shut up!’” (Forgive my relating Hazel’s words as precisely as I can remember). Whatever I was able to achieve with Hazel, getting her to refrain from cursing was never to appear on my success card. I did include Hazel in a six-month ‘Anger Management Group Course’ I held for two hours weekly at the Huddersfield Probation Office. Hazel’s turned out to be a star pupil and her progress probably placed her the category of in some of my finest work.
Hazel eventually moved to the Manchester area, and she met a man whom she married. He seemed to act as a good father to her children and the family appeared to taste happiness again. But Hazel could never be the same as she’d been before her son’s murder. The absence of her oldest son from her life had left a huge hole in her heart which could never be healed.
From all the group activities, Hazel engaged in, learning to relax, helped her more than any other. She no longer lost control of her anger and was able to convert her previous thumps to mere curses. The greatest compliment that Hazel paid me, I was to see inside her car. She once proudly showed me Inside the driver’s door. Hazel pulled down the sunscreen visor and there was a photograph of my face she had cellotaped to the inside of the visor. She told me, ‘If ever I swear at some other car driver for cutting me up, Mr Forde, instead of jumping out and punching him, I just look at your photo and remember my breathing exercises. That mug shot of yours is a lifesaver for me!”
I have known and worked with many a bereaved marriage partner who seemed to be emotionally stuck in the past. Many bereaved widows and widowers stay emotionally unattached through ‘choice’ because they know that no other partner could ever match up to the love they lost. Other bereaved partners might like to meet someone else; for either companionship or even marriage, but still find it very hard to re-join the dating scene and emotionally ‘move on’ with their life. Others seem to spend the remainder of their life doing good works and busying themselves daily with all manner of voluntary and good-neighbourly tasks, to the extent that they haven’t time to think and dwell upon what they once had and lost. Some bereaved people find the reliability and the unqualified love of a pet in their lives invaluable in getting themselves out of the house and feeling alive and worthwhile again. When one loses someone they love, helping a pet from a refuge centre is often the precursor to helping a person, and then to helping oneself move on with life.
Whatever the circumstances of the loss, for many people it is virtually impossible for them to ‘let go’ of the person they loved, and for others, it would be intrinsically wrong for them ever to ‘let go’.
I dedicate my song today to Chand Mahtani who lives in Singapore and who is a very good friend of mine and Sheila. A recent Facebook post of Chands on the 11th October 2019, reveals a story, not too dissimilar to the theme of this post. It is about a woman who adopted a kitten after a family tragedy. The bereaved woman eventually concluded that if she could be happy through helping a kitten then imagine how happy she could become through helping people. Have a good day, Chand. Much love from me and Sheila x
Love and peace Bill xxx
