Singing

Memphis Slim wrote it. But the song "Everyday I Have the Blues" has been Joe Williams' since fans at Chicago's long-gone Club DeLisa began requesting it from the brassy-toned vocalist about 40 years ago. So how does he keep it sounding fresh after all these years? "It's the treatment," he answered in a phone conversation from his Las Vegas home earlier this week. "I'm with Miles Davis on this. I think the treatment of a song is the thing that interests me more than anything else.

Some in the crowd crooned " 'S Wonderful." But there were also cries of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" when a Century City real estate agent stood up the other night to lead a country club dinner crowd in a Gershwin sing-along. The last of the empty papaya and kiwi creme fraiche dessert plates were barely gone from the tables at the El Caballero Country Club as song sheets were handed out and Jim Borax grabbed a microphone. "Do we have any singers in the room?" he demanded.

The San Diego Padres just called to ask if I could sing the national anthem at one of next week's baseball games. "We're looking for people who can outsing Roseanne Barr," a Padre spokesperson spoke. "And I'm the first person you called?" I asked. "Frankly, no." "Who did you call before me?" "Arnold Schwarzenegger." "I see." "And Rob Lowe, and Jerry Lewis, and George Burns, and Sylvester Stallone, and Burt Reynolds, and Robert DeNiro, and Whoopi Goldberg and Pee-wee Herman." "Anybody else?"

The new Tokio restaurant in Hollywood offers everything a 2004 hipster wants: high-end sushi with ingredients like lobster and soft-shell crab; a sleek, loungy atmosphere; the satisfaction that comes with knowing you're hanging out at a place owned by top Hollywood executives; and karaoke. Yes, karaoke. No longer banished to the realm of dive bars and strip malls, karaoke caterwauling has blasted beyond the mere mainstream and into the realm of the downright fashionable.

We do it in the shower. We do it in the car. We do it under our breath at work. And when no one's home, we even do it in front of the mirror with an imaginary microphone. And some of us even do it in the rain. Singing. Ballads and blues, show tunes and classics. But what separates us from professional crooners like Michael Crawford and Aretha Franklin is that they sound good. Fret not, though. As it turns out, carrying a tune isn't all that important.

Though the recording industry is in an uproar over the Milli Villi scandal, lip-syncing--or ghost singing--has been a common practice in the movie industry almost since the advent of talkies. Marni Nixon is the best known of the ghost singers. An accomplished soloist in her own right, her lilting vocals can be heard on the sound tracks of many classic screen musicals. It was Nixon, not Deborah Kerr, who sang "Shall We Dance" and other Rodgers and Hammerstein standards in 1956's "The King & I."

In Lori Loftus' dreams, everybody sings, and performing arts centers share the same popularity among children as stadiums, roller rinks and baseball diamonds. And her group, the Southern California Children's Chorus, has a permanent home somewhere. But Loftus, who is credited with reviving children's choral music in Orange County in the last four years, could be the one to turn her wish list into reality.

With early-bloomer musicians such as Natalia Lafourcade, there's sometimes a thin but crucial line between precociousness and preciousness. When this gifted Mexican pop-rocker released her self-titled solo debut in 2003, she was not yet 20 summers old. But Lafourcade -- a daughter of musicians who grew up singing mariachi and who plays guitar, piano and several other instruments ably and writes or co-writes most of her material -- already had...

IT'S George's fault that I never sang. Freckle-faced, hair-licked, musical-fingered George. Starting in first grade, I sat behind him in the alto row in music class, and that remained my place for eight years of grammar school. He was Mr. Perfect Pitch, the kid who could play "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the piano. I'd open my mouth to sing, and he'd turn around and snap, "You're flat. You're flat." "I've been workin' on the railroad...." I'd begin.

When Dale Evans was buried Saturday, many saw the service as representing not just the death of an American icon but also a reminder that a pop culture was coming to an end. In the past several years, most of the actors known as singing cowboys, who graced the silver screen through the 1950s, have died: "Queen of the West" Evans last Wednesday, her husband, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry in 1998, and Rex Allen in 1999.