#in the celestial trio household | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wonderful-writes · 3 years

Text

Draco Malfoy

Soulmate Headcanons

(Requested by @nathalia124love)

There was a reason why all the Blacks were named after stars.

Draco, like everyone else descended from the House of Black, was cursed with a mark on his arm that reflected his namesake.

His constellation birthmark was nothing but a faded cluster of dots and lines on skin, but it served as a constant reminder of the curse that plagued his mother’s family.

The curse was placed centuries ago, when a certain Black ancestor dared to deny hospitality to an elderly traveler who needed a place to stay for the night.

The traveler turned out to be a powerful witch, who cursed everyone in the Black line to forever see only their celestial namesake in the night sky. The one condition was that the curse could only be broken if the individual met their soulmate.

Draco, being the pessimist he was, didn’t believe he was worthy of love. After all he’s been through and all the suffering he’s caused, he didn’t think it was possible for him to find his soulmate.

So he resigned to accepting his fate of ending up alone and eternally only seeing the Draco constellation in the inky sky.

That all changed the day he was invited to a party at the Potter household.

After the war, Harry and Ginny were dead-set on letting go of past hatreds and moving on with their lives. That included forgiving Draco and their other Death Eater peers.

So there Draco was, in the middle of Harry and Ginny’s living room, sipping on a drink while he waited for someone to approach him.

Most of the partygoers hardly noticed him, as they were all too focused on locating their own friends. Others were afraid of him, as he was both a notorious Malfoy and Black. It didn’t seem like anyone there would have any interest in talking to him.

Well, until you walked in.

You were an old friend of the Golden Trio, whom you met during your days at Hogwarts.

You knew who Draco was, but you had never spoken to him personally. Seeing him all alone, you decided to approach the attractive blond.

“Hey there!” you greeted. “I’m Y/N.”

“Draco Malfoy,” he returned, shaking your hand.

“Are you waiting for someone?” you asked him.

“No, I, uh, I don’t have many friends here,” he admitted. “Harry and Ginny invited me, but I was never really close to them.”

“Ah,” you said knowingly. “I see. Well do you want to step outside? It’s kind of hot in here with all these people.”

Draco was baffled. A stranger — a good-looking one, at that — was inviting him to go for a chat outside? But he was the most unapproachable person on Earth. Who’d want to befriend him?

“Well?” you pressed.

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed, setting down his cup.

The two of you made your way to the backyard, where you sat on the Potters’ lawn chairs and watched the sun go down.

You and Draco talked for hours, getting to know each other.

When the party had died down and the moon had long risen, you were still out there, chatting away.

“Hey, look!” you exclaimed, pointing at the sky. “It’s the North Star. I haven’t been stargazing in forever, but that one was always my favorite. My dad showed it to me as a kid.”

When Draco looked up, he was amazed to see that not only was his namesake constellation in the sky but all the others as well. He could see all the stars! Which could only mean that the curse was broken.

And if the curse was broken, well then, you were his soulmate!

Draco couldn’t be more thrilled at the revelation. He had given up on finding love and happiness but was immediately filled with hope for a better future.

He couldn’t contain his excitement and quickly told you about the curse.

You were equally excited for him and even more excited for yourself because you had just found out that you were destined to be with the man before you.

Throughout the evening, he had charmed you with his humor and kindness and touched your heart with the harrowing stories of his past. You had been drawn to him from the very beginning, and now you were learning that it was meant to be.

That night, the two of you didn’t go home. You spent the night underneath the stars, marveling at the wonders of the universe and how it brought you together.

#draco malfoy x you #draco malfoy x y/n #draco malfoy x reader #draco malfoy fanfiction #draco fanfiction #draco x reader #draco x y/n #draco x you #draco malfoy #draco malfoy headcanon #fanfiction

77 notes · View notes

chiseler · 5 years

Text

YOU’RE A SAP, MISTER JAP

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941, Tin Pan Alley’s songwriters reacted with instant fury and patriotic zeal, churning out hundreds of war songs at a ferocious clip. Amateurs jumped into the fray as well. By December 20, just two weeks later, The Billboard was already reporting that music publishers had received more than one thousand war song submissions. Only a fraction were ever published and recorded, but even that amounted to a lot of records, and a few would have big impacts on American morale early in the war.

The hive of most of that activity was the Brill Building on the west side of Broadway between 49th and 50th Streets. At the start of the century, when the term “Tin Pan Alley” was coined, the music business was concentrated on West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, with Broadway cutting diagonally through. Its nickname referred to the constant racket of cheap upright pianos where guys stacked five stories high toiled long into the night banging out a cacophony of competing tunes. By 1941 most of the publishers had migrated uptown to the eleven-story Brill Building, opened in 1931. Lindy’s, immortalized by Damon Runyon as Mindy’s, was across Broadway.

The first two Tin Pan Alley songs reacting to Pearl Harbor — “We’ll Knock the Japs Right into the Laps of the Nazis” and “We Did It Before (and We Can Do It Again)” — were allegedly written that very day, December 7. Hearing the news from Hawaii, composer Lew Pollack and lyricist Ned Washington whipped out “We’ll Knock the Japs” on Sunday afternoon and rushed it to Bert Wheeler, of the vaudeville and Broadway comedy duo Wheeler & Woolsey. (Woolsey had died in 1938.) Wheeler apparently introduced the song that night as part of his club act in Los Angeles. In part it went:

Oh, we didn't want to do it but they're asking for it now

So we'll knock the Japs right into the laps of the Nazis,

When they hop on Honolulu that's a thing we won't allow

So we'll knock the Japs right into the laps of the Nazis!

Chins up, Yankees, let's see it through,

And show them there's no yellow in the red, white and blue

I'd hate to be in Yokohama when our bombers make their bow,

For we'll knock the Japs right into the laps of the Nazis!

Also on Sunday, another pair of Tin Pan Alley stalwarts, Charles Tobias and Cliff Friend, knocked out “We Did It Before,” a rousing George M. Cohan–style march. Friend is best known now for having written the theme song for Looney Tunes (“The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down”) in 1937. Tobias’s long list of credits includes “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer,” “Merrily We Roll Along” — which he cowrote with his brother-in-law Eddie Cantor, and which Warner Bros. adapted for its Merrie Melodies theme song — as well as one that became a huge hit during the war, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me).”

Cantor introduced “We Did It Before” on his popular weekly radio show that Wednesday, December 10. Dinah Shore sang it on her radio show the following Sunday, and Cantor went on to interpolate it into his stage revue Banjo Eyes, which opened on Broadway on Christmas Day and ran into April 1942. The sheet music was a top ten seller for a couple of months. Bringing things full circle, in 1943 Warner Bros. would use the song in a Merrie Melodies cartoon, Fifth Column Mouse, in which the mice mobilize for war against a dictatorial cat.

By Monday morning, December 8, the Tin Pan Alley trio of lyricist James Cavanaugh (best known for “You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You”), John Redmond, and Nat Simon had written the upbeat “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap”:

You’re a sap, Mr. Jap, you make a Yankee cranky,

You’re a sap, Mr. Jap, Uncle Sam is gonna spanky

It was released as a single before the month was out. In 1942 it also found its way into a cartoon, the first Popeye cartoon of the war, with caricatures of Japanese that were so extreme it was removed from circulation after the war — along with a number of other patriotically racist cartoons — and rarely seen again until the birth of the Internet.

By the week of January 11 Billboard counted twenty-four war singles released since December 7. There was the catchy “Goodbye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama,” written by Brooklyn-born J. Fred Coots, better known for writing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” in 1934. The singer of this song was going to “teach all those Japs / The Yanks are no saps.”

Kate Smith weighed in with the spritely “They Started Somethin’ (But We’re Gonna End It)” and the sentimental ballad “Dear Mom,” a soldier’s letter home. She would follow them in February with “This Time,” a not particularly memorable Irving Berlin number. (“We’ll fight to the finish this time / Then we’ll never have to do it again.”) Billboard listed three different recordings of the inevitable “Remember Pearl Harbor,” plus the clever “Let’s Put the Axe to the Axis” and the swinging “The Sun Will Soon Be Setting (For the Land of the Rising Sun).”

The list also included two interesting “hillbilly” songs, as country music was then called. They emanated not from Nashville but the Brill Building. Tin Pan Alley had been exploring the relatively small markets for hillbilly and folk music since the 1920s. Then the genres got a boost in popularity in 1941 from an unlikely source. In January, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), the professional organization that licensed music to the radio broadcasters, demanded a doubling in fees. Broadcasters responded by pulling all ASCAP music from the airwaves and plugged the gap with music by non-ASCAP members, especially hillbilly and folk. By October, when ASCAP and the broadcasters came to new terms, hillbilly and folk had expanded their niche in the market, and the Tin Pan Alley pros cashed in.

One of those pros was Fred Rose, whose “Cowards Over Pearl Harbor” was a mournful, guitar-strumming folk ballad recorded by Denver Darling. Two of the most prolific were Memphis-born Bob Miller and Kansas-born Carson Robison, who both came to Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s. Miller worked for a while as Irving Berlin’s arranger, while Robison specialized in country and cowboy songs that humorously treated topical themes. Their response to Pearl Harbor was the outrageous “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap,” sung to a silly, quick-time oompah melody:

We're gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap

And Uncle Sam's the guy who can do it

We'll skin the streak of yellow from this sneaky little fellow

And he'll think a cyclone hit him when he's through it

We'll take the double crosser to the old woodshed

We'll start on his bottom and go to his head

When we get through with him he'll wish that he was dead

We gotta slap the dirty little Jap

We're gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap

And Uncle Sam's the guy who can do it

The Japs and all their hooey will be changed into chop suey And the rising sun will set when we get through it

Their alibi for fighting is to save their face

For ancestors waiting in celestial space

We'll kick their precious face down to the other place

We gotta slap the dirty little Jap

Robison went on to record several more humorous war songs, including “Mussolini’s Letter to Hitler” and its flip side “Hitler’s Reply to Mussolini,” “Get Your Gun and Come Along (We’re Fixin to Kill a Skunk),” and “Who’s Gonna Bury Hitler (When the Ornery Cuss Is Dead)?”

Far and away the most successful song responding to Pearl Harbor was Frank Loesser’s “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” one of the biggest hits of 1942. Born into a wealthy Upper West Side Jewish household, Loesser had dismayed his family when he went first to Tin Pan Alley and then to Hollywood, where he wrote the lyrics for such standards as “Heart and Soul,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and “Two Sleepy People.” “Praise the Lord” was inspired by a Pearl Harbor legend concerning the fleet chaplain (“sky pilot” in the song) Father William A. Maguire, who helped carry ammo to the guns firing at the attacking planes and supposedly cried out the song’s title. Father Maguire told Life he didn’t remember saying the line and it would not have been heard in all the uproar even if he did, but you can’t stop a legend. In some versions — including Loesser’s — Maguire actually manned a gun himself.

First recorded by the vocal quartet the Merry Macs, then by Kay Kyser and others, “Praise the Lord” sold huge numbers in both disc and sheet music, nearly matching Irving Berlin’s giant “White Christmas” in sales and jukebox plays for a time. No doubt much of its popularity stemmed from its easy-to-sing simplicity, with lyrics that weren’t much more than the title repeated over and over to a strolling melody that sounded like an old-time spiritual.

Loesser donated his proceeds from the song to the U.S. Navy Relief Fund. After the war he would have a big Broadway hit with Guys and Dolls.

by John Strausbaugh

Excerpted from John's new book Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers During World War II.

0 notes