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This is the first song I recorded after acquiring a ukulele, which means my playing is even worse than it is now. It was written by Joe Raposo, one of the great unsung heroes of songwriting, for the soundtrack of a film by Richard Williams, one of the great unsung heroes of animation. The movie was Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure - a failure when it was released in 1975, but perhaps the film that I watched the most as a kid. My mother can tell you of many occasions when I would prance around the house singing songs from it.

The film, like so many other great films, has yet to be released on DVD. If you happen upon a VHS copy in your local library, it's well worth checking out. Williams, the director, won Oscars for his work as the animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and also made the unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler. There's some particularly trippy animation here, as memory serves, particularly in a sequence with a character who is an enormous blob of candy and sweets who seems to snack on himself.

Joe Raposo was responsible for some of my favorite songs of all-time - and likely yours too - many of them written while serving as the original musical director for Sesame Street. The title song, "Being Green," "C is For Cookie," "Somebody Come and Play" - all are Raposo originals. The original recordings of these songs may be saturated with cutesy instruments and sometimes children's choirs, but stripped down, they often betray a real sense of melancholy.

I suppose stripping down this song is what I attempted to do, though I'm not sure how much of the emotional impact comes through my uneven voice and playing. Here's the sad context for the song within the film: Raggedy Ann and Andy have just met the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees - an old, worn-up, blue stuffed camel who has somehow been separated from the rest of his family. He frequently sees mirages which he believes are his family, but they never turn out to be real. A truly tragic figure, here he sings about wandering alone all these many days.