In the Muse rings in the new season with our foray into territories forged by our colleagues at In Custodia Legis and Inside Adams, who have both established Pic of the Week features. We inaugurate the Music Division’s unique iteration of this feature with an image from a collection which has been the subject of frequent and copious blog posts, but rest assured there are more images in our coffers where this came from. William P. Gottlieb made this photograph of singers Kitty Kallen and Doris Day for the April 9, 1947 issue of Down Beat magazine. A caption inside the magazine describes the singers’ “vernal urge,” though if you ask me the Central Park flora in the background looks like its still fighting off the winter blues.
This first full day of spring also happens to be the birthday of one of the great composers. Read last year’s blog post commemorating Johann Sebastian Bach. Today is also the birthday of legendary showman Florenz Ziegfeld. The Music Division has in its collections sheet music from more than sixty of Zeigfeld’s popular Follies and other shows; search for Ziegfeld in It’s Showtime!, the newly released database of show music in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Read more about the storied entertainer and his famous follies in Today in History in American Memory.