The Independent 7 March 2024

Lacy J. Dalton (born Jill Lynne Byrem on October 13, 1946 in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania), is an American country singer and songwriter with a career that has spanned many decades and touched the hearts of millions of music fans.

John Wilson’s fourth volume devoted to music by Eric Coates opens with Music Everywhere, a rousing march that was commissioned by Britain’s first independent TV and radio service, Rediffusion, for use as its signature tune. The concert waltz Footlights is a life-affirming evocation of the glamour of the inter-war West End, created just weeks before the start of the Second World War. In wartime, as it turned out, the demand for refreshing, morale-boosting music would be higher than ever. Coates’s ‘Souvenir’ I Sing to You was premièred on 14 March 1940 – the week in which wartime meat rationing was introduced in the UK.