{"id":5156,"date":"2010-10-31T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2010\/10\/when-october-goes.html"},"modified":"2010-10-31T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T11:00:00","slug":"when-october-goes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2010\/10\/when-october-goes.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;When October goes&#8230;&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> For the last day of the month: what may arguably be Barry Manilow&#8217;s best song (or, at least, my own personal favorite), set to a gorgeous lyric by the legendary <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Johnny_Mercer\">Johnny Mercer. <\/a> <\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/When_October_Goes\">Wikipedia entry<\/a> on this song says: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p> In his last year, as he was dying from brain cancer, Mercer became extremely fond of Manilow, in part because Manilow&#8217;s first hit record was of a song titled &#8220;Mandy,&#8221; which was also the name of Mercer&#8217;s daughter. After Mercer&#8217;s death, his widow, Ginger Mehan Mercer, arranged to give some unfinished lyrics he had written to Manilow to possibly develop into complete songs. Among these was &#8220;When October Goes.&#8221; Manilow applied his own melody to the lyric and issued it as a single in 1984.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> Manilow tells more of the story in the clip below.  Enjoy.  <\/p>\n<p><center><object height=\"385\" width=\"480\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/SyJm-vB2ExQ?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;color1=0x006699&amp;color2=0x54abd6\" \/><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/SyJm-vB2ExQ?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;color1=0x006699&amp;color2=0x54abd6\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" height=\"385\" width=\"480\"><\/object><\/center> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the last day of the month: what may arguably be Barry Manilow&#8217;s best song (or, at least, my own personal favorite), set to a gorgeous lyric by the legendary Johnny Mercer. The Wikipedia entry on this song says: In his last year, as he was dying from brain cancer, Mercer became extremely fond of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-this-that"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&quot;When October goes...&quot; - The Deacon&#039;s Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2010\/10\/when-october-goes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;When October goes...&quot; - The Deacon&#039;s Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For the last day of the month: what may arguably be Barry Manilow&#8217;s best song (or, at least, my own personal favorite), set to a gorgeous lyric by the legendary Johnny Mercer. 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