Song of the Day 3/2: “Where Is Love?”

Those kids who’ve been separated from their parents and kept in cages at the border haven’t gotten much media time lately — the last thing I saw, about a week ago, concerned a study that found family separation affects people the same was torture does. This barely registered as a blip in the news cycle.

What could convince people to care more about this horror? Well, back in Charles Dickens’ day, a novelist could write “Oliver Twist” as a magazine serial to reveal the horrors of the government’s child welfare policies, successfully appealing to the public’s conscience. In the 20th century Lionel Bart could transform that raw material into a musical, giving young orphaned Oliver a heartrending song to express a lonely child’s longing for his mother. In the movie of the musical, the song is credited to Mark Lester, but reportedly was dubbed by Kathe Green, the daughter of the film’s conductor and musical arranger, Johnny Green.

So the obvious solution to the American public’s indifference to child hostage-taking would be to stage an “Oliver!” revival set in a border concentration camp, and wait for “¿Dónde Está el Amor?” to get them to feel some compassion. We might have to Latinize the music somewhat, so long as we don’t do it like this cover. Having mononymous pop singer Oliver record the song was perhaps inevitable; the bossa nova arrangement on his 1969 LP was not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn9Hhq1e6h0