A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

Aging Gratefully

Colonel John Gilpin

By: Paul S Cilwa Posted: 10/19/2026 Page Views: 26
Hashtags: #Music #Video #1940s #BigBand #ComicSong
Cowper's runaway horse, re-enlisted as a Jeep with no steering wheel.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (104 words)

Colonel John Gilpin

The Paul S Cilwa Project

Paul S Cilwa, after William Cowper

"The Diverting History of John Gilpin" is a poem from 1782 and concerns a London linen-draper whose borrowed horse bolts, takes his hat and his wig with it, and carries him thirteen miles past the dinner he was going to. In this song, we take Gilpin and his predicament, but put him in 1943 and in a wayward Jeep instead. In the darkest days of World War II, troops were entertained by humorous songs of inadvertent derring-do, such as this one.

1943

By: Paul S Cilwa Posted: 10/9/2026 Page Views: 211
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #USO #BigBand
Songs from an alternate Earth where I was alive in the 1940s, leading a big band on a USO tour.

Given today's dystopian political environment, I can hardly be blamed for looking back to a simpler time when America actually was, not only pretty great, but beloved across the world. (Well, except for Germany and Japan.) In terms of technique and content, this album's a bit of a departure. Instead of digging up old lyrics of my mom's and arranging them as pop tunes (well, okay, I did do one of those here), I invented an alternate Earth—one where I had been born in 1873, and was still alive in 1943, leading a big band on a USO tour instead of showing up decades later as a Boomer with a laptop.