Is It Live, Or Is It Memories?

I have mentioned before that Christmas, 1963 brought a technological advance to our home. My parents bought a reel-to-reel tape deck, and they recorded audio to accompany most of the Super 8mm film footage my dad took of a number of big family events. A few times during my early childhood, my dad pulled out the projector and showed the footage. I laughed at most of it. Then the film went into a box, not to be seen again for ages.

I have not mentioned before that my sister found the film reels in our attic, and she had them transferred to DVD for me for Christmas, 2004. Then, for the first time in my active memory, I saw my mother at Christmas in 1959, pregnant with her only child. She looked happy. Considering that she had just ten more years of life in her, I find the images bittersweet.

But today’s post is about the audio. I confiscated the tape recorder and the audio tapes right after college, and eventually I transferred them to my hard drive. I had to use a different machine for the playback, because the original one had given up all of its ghosts. It still spins, but all you hear is static, no matter what tape you slip between capstan and roller.

When I played one of the tapes, I heard three-year-old caithiseach opening a present and finding a mechanical dog that I could take for a walk by pulling on his leash. My adult persona exclaimed, “Gaylord!” And a deep memory unlocked itself.



Then, later on, the tape came on at the end of a song I had forgotten. The 45 that held it was a children’s record with two songs per side. It was almost certainly on the P-R-O-M-E-N-A-D-E label, though I had some kids’ Western tunes on a 4-song 45 with a black label as well. That 45 was a Victim of the Great Vinyl Meltdown. The thing is, I had the second song, “Pony Boy” by Marty Martin and His Six-Shooters, on a separate Peter Pan 45 (Peter Pan 535), which survived the Meltdown. Thus, I remembered that song, which, according to the tape, was the song I preferred of the two my mom recorded.

But as an adult, having just the last few seconds of “A Boy in Buckskin (and a Gal in Calico)” on an old tape was not enough. As soon as I heard the song, I remembered enjoying the melody and the harmonies involved. So, I started my search.

One guy had put the recording I was after online, from an album he had encoded in RealAudio (that was therefore mushy-sounding). The album billed the singer as Artie Malvin, who had a career in the Army during World War II, singing for Glenn Miller. In a bit of historical irony, Artie seems to have sung a version of “A Gal in Calico,” which is a different song and confuses search engines mightily. In the 1950s, Artie, who is in fine voice here, sang a lot of children’s songs.

I made do with that recording for a while, but eventually I found that someone who owned an antiques shop had a 7” 78 rpm record (Peter Pan 415) that included the identical recording, but billed as by Frankie Starr with the Peter Pan Orchestra and Chorus, directed by Vicky Kasen. This version also had the sound of squeaky wagon wheels dubbed into the martial drum intro and the outro. Dumb. But both the RealAudio and the 78 version had a verse that had been cut off my 45, so I was glad to get the 78.

The final verse, though, is about as jingoistic a piece of music as I could ever hope to hear. I don’t have a problem with being proud of some of the things my country has done in honest attempts to improve life for people in other nations, but my applause for attempts to recreate the British Empire American-style is tepid.

So. In order to get rid of the squeaky wagon wheels, I took an identical opening drum riff and spliced it onto the recording. My kind commentator, Yah Shure, apologized awhile ago for mentioning the name of Mitch Miller in a blog comment, but the drums are from his version of “Yellow Rose of Texas.” So there.

After “A Boy in Buckskin” comes “Pony Boy,” a song that defies lyrical logic: “Pony Boy, Pony Boy, won’t you be my Tony Boy. Don’t say no, here we go, off across the plains. Carry me, marry me, ride away with you . . . “ I do not get it at all. Is he planning to marry his horse? Or a boy? There is something slightly twisted going on, and I’ll need some therapy to get over that one.

The writer of “A Boy in Buckskin” was J. Fred Coots (1897-1985), who registered more than 300 songs with ASCAP and, according to Wikipedia, wrote more than 700 songs, often for children. His biggest hit would have to be “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” (I promise I am not trying to bring on Christmas early.) But that song gets some competition from “Love Letters in the Sand.”

Regardless of who really sang “A Boy in Buckskin,” you have to give credit to the people who made the recording for trying to put together a decent effort. Some thought was put into the instrumentation and the vocal arrangement, unlike a lot of today’s kids’ music, which was clearly recorded in someone’s house on a $100 Casio keyboard. Gone, too, are the days when songwriters used three-syllable words in songs aimed at kids. Maybe that will change at some point, but I’m not optimistic.

For Saturday, I have a couple more juvenile recordings, one a 1920s song for adults, and the other a legendary folk tune. See you then!

Artie Malvin?, A Boy in Buckskin

Marty Martin and His Six-Shooters, Pony Boy