My Quest for “Firefly”

If you are of a certain age, maybe you know the anguish of searching in vain for a favorite song of your youth on compact disc. You look everywhere, as for a lost love, but you can’t find it. Will you ever hear it again, except in your imagination?

My lost song is “Firefly,” by Tony Bennett. To be precise, it’s his first version I can’t find. He recorded the song several more times, but he never did it with the glorious abandon of the first one, with Ray Ellis’s orchestra. It sounds like a music-hall song, the sort of thing Al Jolson might have done. And Bennett in those days had better pipes than Jolson or anyone else. It has been estimated that, over his long career, Bennett’s voice has raised 7.3 trillion goose bumps worldwide.

I first remember hearing the song around 1958. I was at Boy Scout camp in Michigan on a chilly Saturday morning, and somebody had one of those new transistor radios that you didn’t even have to plug in. Out of that radio came the happiest, most thrilling sound I’d ever heard: “I call her Firefly ...”

Later I laid out a dollar I’d saved up (it took a few days back then) and bought the 45 RPM record. To today’s youth, a 45 means either a drink or a gun, but ancient mariners will recall when it meant a little vinyl record that revolved 45 times per minute, as opposed to the old 78s, the newer 33s, or even the 16s (which never caught on). It had a big hole in the center, into which you had to snap a little yellow plastic doohickey to make it fit the skinny spindle on most turntables. You played it with a metal needle, so it wore out fast. And it was easy to scratch or crack. This is my chief memory of the Eisenhower era.

A couple of years after that, “Firefly” was also released on a long-playing 33 RPM album of Tony Bennett’s greatest hits. I bought it again in that form. The song really hadn’t been that much of a hit, except with me.

But devouring time took its toll on my LP collection, also sadly subject to scratches, and in my maturity I had to buy the album again on audiocassette in order to hear “Firefly.” But, wouldn’t you know, I lost the tape.

When the compact disc came along, I resumed the quest. I bought several Bennett albums and collections that included “Firefly.” But alas, none of them carried that priceless original version. My adult life has been a period of unbroken disappointment.

Finally, last weekend, I found a new, two-CD collection of Bennett classics. It included “Firefly”! But the jacket didn’t say whether it was the 1958 recording I wanted, my personal Holy Grail. Should I risk $25 to find out? Inevitably, I did.

I rushed home and spent the long hours it takes to open a CD — John Ashcroft must be in charge of packaging these things — and stuck it into the player. I pressed the remote. In a second, from the first note, I would learn whether I had the 1958 “Firefly” at last! Could it really be?

No!

It wasn’t as disappointing as the other subsequent versions Bennett has done, but it just wasn’t the one I wanted.

So that’s my life. Here I am, a bitter old man, with a large collection of Tony Bennett records to show for my long years on earth. My sole consolation is that I love Tony Bennett, but there is a lot of redundancy here. After all, how many copies of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” does a man need? I must own at least eight by now.

As far as I know, nobody else has ever recorded “Firefly” — or “San Francisco,” for that matter. Or “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” Most singers have too much sense to invite comparison with Tony Bennett in his prime. His voice was so commanding that the very memory of it can drown out anyone who sings a song he has put his stamp on.

The only one unwise enough to risk this is Tony himself. He has repeatedly competed with the Tony Bennett who recorded “Firefly” in 1958, and he has lost every time.

Joseph Sobran