My song today is, ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’. This song by Neil Diamond was co-written with his guitarist, Richard Bennett. This up-tempo track, released as a single by Columbia in February 1979, was taken from the previous year's Neil Diamond album ‘You Don’t Bring Me, Flowers’. Neil Diamond said about the song: "The simple things are really the important things”.
The song officially peaked at Number 20 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart and Number 2 on the ‘Easy Listening’ chart in March, 1979.
According to ‘Cotton Incorporated’, "Neil Diamond might have been right when he named his 1979 Number 1 hit ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’ as 81% of women are planning their next jeans purchase to be some shade of blue." The song has been used to promote the sale of blue jeans, most notably Will Ferrell, impersonating Neil Diamond singing, for ‘The Gap’. Coincidentally, Diamond himself did radio adverts for H.I.S. brand jeans in the 1960s, more than a decade before he sang this song.
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Despite having lived and worked in Canada during the early 1960s, as well as travelling around parts of the USA and being a great fan of Country & Western music, I cannot recall wearing a pair of Jeans until I was in my late 30s. While cowboys and Americans started wearing them during the last century, I was approaching 40 years old before I donned my first pair of denim.
Jeans are pants made from denim or dungaree cloth. They were invented by Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss in 1873 and are worn still today as both work and fashionable clothing items. The name ‘Jeans’ originates from the city of Genoa in Italy, a place where cotton corduroy, called either ‘jean’ or jeane’ was manufactured.
I can still recall the American President, Jimmy Carter, being publicly seen wearing jeans as he performed some presidential duty on the television in 1977, and also President Ronald Reagan and President George Bush Snr. As for me, I was brought up in the era of wearing suits and I kept this tradition when I became a Probation Officer in 1971. No Probation Officer would have been allowed entrance to either work or inside a court building in 1971 without a suit or wearing black or brown leather shoes of a sober design. Similarly, while female Probation Officers could wear more colourful clothes, all trouser wear was strictly deemed inappropriate and banned. In fact, female Probation Officers never wore trousers when performing duties at work or in court, and rarely in the home (with the exception of a few young women officers who wore the pants in their marriage).
Love and peace Bill xxx