Greetings music slutinos, and welcome to the first Manor Music post for the new year! It's back to work for many of you today - and I know, blech. Myself, I want at least another week off, but, hey, music can be a vacation, right? No, really, it can. Tonight, at the Manor's exclusive "Bush Diver" after-hours bar and taquitoria, DJ Li'l Scratch will be playing just want you need to hear as you start the work week. Something effortlessly light, something to sweep away the drudgery, something with giggles.  How about "The Girl With A Giggle In Her Voice?" That's what she was dubbed in the early 1950s. Behold the chucklesome Alma Cogan, here in her dressing room just seconds before hitting the stage. She designed all of her fetching costumes, by the way. Never once was she seen in the same outfit twice.  I 'm still trying to wrap my noggin around the fact that she was, for quite a long time, the highest-paid female performer ever in the UK (until th...

On May 4, 1929, in the charming city of Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, Audrey Kathleen Ruston, known to the world as Audrey Hepburn, was born. She was the cherished daughter of the Dutch baroness Ella Van Heemstra and Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston. Her father embraced the more aristocratic surname Hepburn-Ruston, adding a touch of nobility to their family name. Audrey's childhood was a tapestry of experiences woven with the threads of different cultures as she spent time in Belgium, England, and the Netherlands, following her father's work assignments. There doesn't seem to be much indication that her very early life was troubled, but that would soon change. In the early 1940s,  the dark shadows of World War II fell upon Audrey and her family as they endured the hardships of life in Nazi-occupied Holland. In an instinctual protective gesture, her mother temporarily changed Audrey’s name to Edda Van Heemstra, to shield her British heritage from the Nazis. Yet, amidst the turmoil...