The Great Vinyl Meltdown

You Can't Do This in Most Homes Now, but It's Safe to Do If You Own Vinyl

2009-08-12T11:49:00.003-05:00

Hello, friends. This summer has been a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, the best of times and the worst of times, with little middle ground. I intended to keep blogging from the road as I traveled, but I was forced to spend far too much of my non-driving time doing work for an employer who doesn’t appreciate me enough to pay me for that work. I did get to do what I wanted to do, which was travel to as many Famous Dave’s barbeque restaurants as I could, and my efforts there seem to have earned me a year of free food. That’s the best/sublime part. The ridiculous/worst part—well, would you do two hundred extra hours of professional work, even if it’s spread over the course of an entire year, for nothing? That’s what I was supposed to do. And I was supposed to do a lot of it in the summer, when I am also expected to be gearing up for another year of teaching.

And so, the only things that could get me onto the blog this summer were the death of a pop icon and the arrival of Vinyl Record Day.

I want to talk about a feature of vinyl records that you simply can’t reproduce with a digital file, at least not without a bunch of software. In the days of record players, the act I’m going to describe was easy to undertake and loads of fun.

I’m talking about playing a song at the wrong speed.

I was very small when I acquired my first 78 rpm records, and I learned by accident that playing them at LP speed created deep rumbling sounds. To my young ears, the ponderous, roaring noises resembled what the world must have sounded like in the time of dinosaurs. Singing transformed itself into roars of rage, and drums became the earth-shaking thuds of huge dinosaur feet slamming into the earth.

Moving in the opposite direction, my 16 2/3 rpm talking-book records, played at 78, made sounds like very small, energetic animals. I’m glad I wasn’t using headphones when I was five, or I might have scrambled my brain.

I’m not sure I would have thought to talk about this aspect of vinyl if I hadn’t spoken recently with whiteray about something I did by accident a couple of years ago. At that time, I acquired a 45 of “Are You Ready?” by Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the late-night WLS hits from the summer of 1970, when I used music to distract me from the many issues I would otherwise have been pondering.

When I slapped that 45 on my turntable, it started playing at 33 1/3 rpm. I smiled to myself and let it run through the very slow intro. And then, when the song slid into its groove, magic occurred.

The backing track, played at normal speed, is pretty solid. But when it slowed to 74% of its regular speed, the guitar, bass and drums sounded like a raunchy slow blues that opened up the track to serve as the underpinning for any new melody and lyrics you might want to lay over it. Have a listen, and feel free to write a song around the riff.

And that, folks, is something you’ve never been able to do with a mere CD player and a shiny disc. When CD players first came out in 1983, someone, and I think it was Yamaha, made a CD player with a pitch control. That feature soon disappeared, though some players now offer pitch control again. However, I doubt that you can drop the pitch of a CD enough to create the effect of flipping the speed of a turntable from 45 to 33.

The song links below do what I described above. If you’re a product of the CD generation and you’ve never fiddled with the speed on a turntable, now you don’t have to—unless you want to. I hope you enjoy this glimpse at what five-year-old audio engineers used to do.

This is one of the many reasons why vinyl should never be allowed to disappear from the face of the earth.

It just occurred to me for the first time to wonder why my parents never asked me why I was playing my records at an ultra-slow speed. If I ever come up with an answer, I’ll let you know.

Diamonds, The Very Slow Stroll

Sterling Holloway, Mother Goose on Speed

Pacific Gas & Electric, Are You Ready to Use This Groove?

Dolly Parton, Here You Come Again, But More Slowly

Oh, Michael.

2009-06-25T20:01:00.001-05:00

He was born in Gary, Indiana, 21 months before me. I’m from Gary, too. We kids were all so proud of the child singer. He gave us a dream. His voice cheered me through the dark summer of 1970 after my mother died in January. His summer hit turned out to be my favorite 1970 song.

I will always remember him as the singer of the following songs.

Sorry for the hiatus. Back Saturday.

Jackson 5, ABC

Jackson 5, The Love You Save

Jackson 5, I'll Be There

You’ve All Heard His Name

2009-06-03T23:23:00.002-05:00

A long list of names from music’s pioneer era still shows up in print or in conversation. Many readers will have heard of such people as Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Al Jolson, yet a decent percentage of this crowd will never have actually heard their recordings. I attribute this fact primarily to the disappearance of their recording catalogs from the shelves as far back as the vinyl days. Though such a creature probably exists, I have never seen a two-LP set of Paul Whiteman’s Greatest Hits.

Thanks to the sad state of pre-1955 reissues, a vast array of artists who once were the last word in music may never cross your eardrums. Think about it: Vanilla Ice is long gone as a hot commodity, but you can still buy his musical output. Much deeper digging, and greater motivation, are required to make the music of Thomas Waller part of your world.

They called him “Fats,” and apart from the iconic name, there are plenty of iconic song titles to his credit, including “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose.” The titles are most likely familiar, especially since a 1970s Broadway musical celebrating the Waller legacy put him on the map for a new generation. You may have heard these two songs, but probably by other artists. Today, you can hear the Fats Waller versions of these and a couple of other tunes.

Thomas Waller was born in New York in 1904. He began to study the piano when he was six years old, and when he was 14, he went to live with pianist Russell Brooks after Fats’s mother died. He polished his stride piano technique under the tutelage of James P. Johnson, the master of the form, which involves rapid left-hand octaves as the rhythmic base for the right-hand melody. (I simplify.)

Apart from his considerable jazz knowledge, Fats studied the classical repertoire with significant tutors, including the Austrian conductor Karl Böhm. It’s his classical training that took Fats to the next level: in his recordings, you hear structures that you hear in recordings by acclaimed classical pianists who are playing masterful compositions. With apologies, Fats was known as the “black Vladimir Horowitz.”

Fats was a powerful artist with as light and agile a touch as any pianist’s, when he needed it. It should not be surprising that his compositions display inventiveness and nuance so understated that his listeners may not even have known why they found him so impressive.

Something that frustrated Fats was the failure of this audience to give him the respect due a Horowitz. His vocals were playful, especially when he had been told to record a Tin Pan Alley tune that he considered to be garbage. By laughing in the face of such songs, he made them work and made them his own. This frivolity, though, paired with the ease with which he flowed through the notes, made him seem perhaps less serious than a pianist who would appear in a tux, bow to the audience, play with a permanent frown on his face, break a sweat, and bow to much applause, the first noise from the audience, at the end of the performance.

Fats, then, probably never received his due, and there’s no question that race contributed to the nation’s perception of his work. He was notable enough as a pop-culture phenomenon to appear in caricature in a Merrie Melodies short, “Tin Pan Alley Cats.” (You can find it at YouTube; it is one of the Censored Eleven Warner Brothers cartoons.) Whether that nod in his direction was really an honor is debatable, but I’m certain that no similar Horowitz send-up was considered. Liberace got the treatment, but he was no Horowitz.

Okeh Records first recorded Fats when he was 18 years old, and soon he was in demand as a composer. With lyricist Andy Razaf, he composed the songs for three Broadway musicals before the end of the 1920s. “Ain’t Misbehavin’” came from the show Hot Chocolates.

Once Fats started recording for Victor around 1929, his group, billed as Fats Waller & His Rhythm, produced 63 Top 25 hits, including 6 that topped the charts. In the manner of George Gershwin, Fats composed a major work, “London Suite,” and he recorded it in London in early 1939. He was scheduled to tour Europe that spring, but Hitler made things hard for him.

Fats came by his nickname honestly, and he ate and drank with abandon. He was experiencing strain from his multiple pursuits, including a fairly successful film career and the writing of more musicals. After a Hollywood engagement in December, 1943, he contracted pneumonia, and he took a train back to New York. He only made it to Kansas City, where he died on December 15, 1943.

The works of Fats Waller are, unlike those of many artists of his era, mostly available these days. Several hundred of his recordings can be found for download. To make the task of collecting Fats easier for you, I’ll post five tunes.

Now that I have bought myself a 1-terabyte music-storage drive, I’m going to work on acquiring bunches of Fats Waller recordings. Many are available on eMusic, where they cost about a quarter each. As amazing as his songs are, the songs are a bargain at a much higher price.

There you have it. The music of Fats Waller, available for listening to those of you who know the name, but not the sounds. Enjoy!

Saturday, it’s Week Twenty-Three of the 1950s Chart Meltdown. See you then!

Fats Waller, Ain't Misbehavin'

Fats Waller, Honeysuckle Rose

Fats Waller, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

Fats Waller, Truckin'

Fats Waller, Your Feet's Too Big

People Don’t Eat People; Purple People Eat People

2009-05-31T02:23:00.005-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

I’m done teaching for the 2008-2009 school year! You might think that would give me a lot of time to write a music blog, or sleep, or things like that. I’m not to that point in the wrap-up process yet, and this will be a very busy summer regardless of how quickly I sort out everything at school.

A quick note: Sometimes I think about how cool it is that people come here from very far away. So, hello to my reader in Skopje! (Everyone else will get his or her turn later.)

Given how busy I’ve been, I’m hoping you won’t mind if I focus on the lighter side of 1950s pop in this installment of my perusal of the charts.

May 28, 1955: It’s week five at #1 on the Best Sellers chart for “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra. The King of the Mambo also is getting the most airplay, but Georgia Gibbs still rules the Juke Box chart with “Dance with Me Henry (Wallflower).”

Tunes new to the Best Sellers are “Blue Star” by a One-Hit Wonder, Felicia Sanders, a cover of “Heart” by the Four Aces, and “Love Me or Leave Me” by S. Davis Jr. This would be Sammy, debuting his fourth-biggest Top 40 hit of eight. The biggest won’t come until 1972, when he scores a chart-topper with “The Candy Man.”

Bill Haley’s current hit is now a Top Ten single, climbing from #14 to #10 on the Best Sellers. He finally registers on the Jockey chart, at #20. Airplay is likely to fuel sales and really get this song moving.

June 2, 1956: There is finally a chink in the armor of “Heartbreak Hotel.” The Jockeys have turned their attention to “Moonglow and Theme from Picnic,” Morris Stoloff’s smooth instrumental. Elvis will not be completely done at #1 for a few weeks.

Some hot numbers just entering the charts will have lasting legacies. “It Only Hurts for a Little While” by the Ames Brothers is not one of them, but “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” by Elvis is. Apart from being a hard title to type, this song has jumped from #90 to #31 on the Top 100, and it enters the Best Sellers at #19.

June 3, 1957: “All Shook Up” is no longer the Best Seller #1, but it remains the favorite on the other three charts. Pat Boone has dislodged Elvis on the Best Sellers with “Love Letters in the Sand.”

There is an odd and not very resonant group of debuts this week. “Goin’ Steady” by Tommy Sands, “Freight Train” by Rusty Draper, and “Four Walls” by Jim Lowe make their first Best Seller appearances. Showing her street cred with the Jockeys, Patti Page debuts a two-sided hit on that chart, with “Old Cape Cod” leading the way, and “Wondering” following. Lieutenant Buddy Knox with the Rhythm Orchids debuts “Rock Your Little Baby to Sleep” on the Top 40 and the radio chart.

June 2, 1958: The Everly Brothers maintain the consensus #1 song, “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” Someone is sneaking up on them, but the Jockeys will give the Brothers the nod for a couple more weeks.

The Champs hope their latest debut single, “El Rancho Rock,” will maintain the magic of “Tequila.” Of course, it won’t, just as 1960’s “Too Much Tequila” will also stall at #30. Jerry Lee Lewis is hoping that “High School Confidential” will be his fourth consecutive Top Ten hit. The Jockeys won’t play the song, though, because they have been made aware that Jerry Lee’s wife is thirteen (13) (XIII) years old, and she is also the daughter of his bass player, his first cousin J.W. Brown. Sigh.

There are a couple of Spanish-themed tunes debuting on the Best Sellers: “Zorro” by the Chordettes and “Padre” by Toni Arden, the only Rock Era Top 40 hit for a singer whose hits go back to the 1940s. And that about wraps up the debuts for this week . . . oh, except for the #7 song on both the Best Sellers and toe Top 100, which even the Jockeys have catapulted to #10: “The Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley. And yes, it will be a huge #1 hit shortly.

June 1, 1959: We have a new #1 song, the history lesson I mentioned last week. Though the story is told in the first person, I do not believe Johnny Horton was old enough to witness the events of 1814, but he sings successfully about “The Battle of New Orleans.”

What’s new? A song for beatniks, “Bongo Rock” by Preston Epps. This One-Hit Wonder is joined by another, the Wailers, who are really hard to find via search engines unless you mention the name of their hit, “Tall Cool One.” For some reason, the song will rechart in 1964, but that doesn’t make them a Two-Hit Wonder in my book.

Also jumping into the Top 40 are “Crossfire” by Johnny and the Hurricanes, “Bobby Sox to Stockings” by Frankie Avalon, “I Waited Too Long” by LaVern Baker, “My Heart Is an Open Book” by Carl Dobkins Jr., “Along Came Jones” by the Coasters, and both “Lipstick on Your Collar” and “Frankie” by Connie Francis. Now, that’s a week chock-full of debuts.

For your listening pleasure, I can’t resist the obvious: here’s the huge 1958 debut by Sheb Wooley, a future 6-week #1, and a pop One-Hit Wonder nevertheless. If you check your country chart book, though, you’ll find that Sheb has 8 Top 40 Country hits to his credit. This novelty tune is not one of them.

For Wednesday, I’ll bring you the thrice-postponed discussion of a piano player many of us know by name—only. I’ve been delayed by work responsibilities and a desire to get this post just right. See you Wednesday!

Sheb Wooley, The Purple People Eater

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 21: Summer Songs, Beaches and Barbeque

2009-05-23T21:48:00.002-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

Lots has gone on this week. On Monday, the initiative to remove parking meters in St. Cloud, Minnesota, passed the City Council unanimously. Since I was the guy who got the ball rolling, I was busy both before and after that meeting, and I spoke to the City Council that night. That had a lot to do with the lack of a Wednesday post, but it wasn’t my only task.

On my web site I have a page I devote to Famous Dave’s, my favorite barbeque restaurant. The company’s ad agency found my page recently. As a result, I am in the running with a few other “Famous Fans” to see who can come up with the best mini-promotion this summer. I figure that, to assure myself of victory (which would earn me free barbeque for a year), I pretty much need to conquer the barbeque-eating world, and the rest of the world as well. You can help!

It’s not hard: if you have a Facebook account, please join my group: BarbeQuest. You don’t even have to become my friend to do it. If you aren’t on Facebook, you can find the BarbeQuest on MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, though I haven’t gotten any video up there yet. I have put some details about my fascination with Famous Dave’s in a blog called BarbeQuest, which you can find via a link to the right.

What is the BarbeQuest? I have plans to travel to every Famous Dave’s location, which means I’ll be visiting 177 restaurants in 38 states. My count is at 32 right now. You can see the list here.

You can win prizes through my group as well. The ad agency, John Roach Productions of Madison, Wisconsin, also has weekly challenges, which I transmit via my networking pages. Weekly Challenge #1 is to write a haiku about the ’Que for Two Platter, one of three summer menu items. But the promotional push is available to you at Facebook or Blogger, so now, let’s get to the charts!

All winter, any contact with summery songs seemed like torture to me. Now that winter seems to have ended here, it’s appropriate that one of the premiere surf/car acts of the 1960s would make its inaugural chart appearance this week—in 1958.

May 21, 1955: In its fourth week atop the Best Sellers, “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra has finally overtaken the competition to top the Jockey chart, but Georgia Gibbs still reigns on the Juke Box chart with “Dance with Me Henry (Wallflower).”

After starting its chart run on the Jockey chart, Eddie Fisher’s “Heart,” an eventual Top Ten hit, tiptoes onto the Best Sellers this week. Eddie is joined by the Sunnysiders, whose one Top 40 hit, “Hey, Mr. Banjo,” enters as the biggest Best Seller debut of the week. Despite their status as a One-Hit Wonder, the Sunnysiders include two former members of Spike Jones & His City Slickers, and another, Margie Rayburn, will have a solo hit in 1957.

In the Big Mover department, we have Bill Haley’s new hit climbing from #22 to #14 on the Best Sellers. There is neither Jockey nor Juke Box action yet, but this record could be as big as "Shake, Rattle and Roll," which reached #7 and spent half a year on the charts.

May 26, 1956: “Heartbreak Hotel” is still on top of everything. I get the impression that, had anyone had the foresight to rename a hotel as the single was released, it would have had a pretty good occupancy wake for a chunk of 1956.

Whereas there were no Best Seller debuts last week, this week there are three: “Picnic” by the McGuire Sisters, “Ivory Tower” by Gale Storm, and “Walk Hand in Hand” by Tony Martin. As insignificant as these titles may sound from an historic perspective, two of them are future Top Tens, and “Picnic” will reach #13.

May 27, 1957: Once again, “All Shook Up” is the consensus #1 song.

Some very recognizable debuts arrive on the Best Sellers: “Bye Bye Love” by the Everly Brothers and “It’s Not for Me to Say” by Johnny Mathis, for example. A dual Top Ten arrives, as Fats Domino’s Valley of Tears” checks in. Its flip, “It’s You I Love,” will get legs in a couple of weeks and start to compete with the A-side. A One-Hit Wonder, Johnnie & Joe, will reach the Top Ten with “Over the Mountain, Across the Sea,” which also joins the ranks this week.

May 26, 1958: Once again, the Everly Brothers have the consensus #1 song, “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” They should appreciate the moment, as they will soon be eaten alive by a huge novelty phenomenon.

Debuting on both the Best Sellers Top 40 and the Top 100 Top 40 is a couple of minutes of creepiness by Jody Reynolds, “Endless Sleep.” It’s not quite the “teen death song” that we will see surge around 1960, but it’s depressing enough as a precursor to the craze. It will be Jody’s sole Top 40 hit.

Another Best Seller/Top 100 debut marks the start of a huge career: “I Wonder Why” by Dion and the Belmonts. In the same vein, Jan & Arnie garner their first Top 40 hit, Jennie Lee. The song includes the voices of Jan Berry, Arnie Ginsburg, and Dean Torrence, but Dean was in the Army when Jan signed with a label. When Dean got out, Arnie joined the Navy, and Jan & Dean went on to become surf-rock pioneers.

Over at the Top 100, one huge debut is Bobby Freeman’s debut pop hit, “Do You Want to Dance,” which jumps into the Top 40 at #19. It’s also new to the Best Sellers Top 40, moving from #48 to #21 there.

May 25, 1959: Wilbert Harrison remains at #1, though he will give way to a history lesson next week. Among the debuts is a song with an iconic title, “Tallahassee Lassie,” Freddy Cannon’s first hit single. Fats Domino gets off to a good start with “I’m Ready,” which enters as the highest-charting debut at #29.

For your listening pleasure, I’m thinking you might not have heard the Jan & Dean prototype single before. Enjoy its faint resemblance to what is to come a few years later.

For Wednesday, I’ll bring you the twice-postponed discussion of a piano player many of us know by name—only. See you then!

Jan & Arnie, Jennie Lee

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 20: Unchain Me

2009-05-16T23:28:00.002-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

All sorts of melodies, unchained and otherwise, make up an uneven weeks of debuts on the 1950s charts.

May 14, 1955: This week’s #1 songs show one of the curiosities of the pre-Hot 100 chart system. If you happen to research the hits of May, 1955, you will see that “Unchained Melody” by Les Baxter, “Dance with Me Henry (Wallflower)” by Georgia Gibbs, and “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” by Pérez Prado all reached #1. Only the fine print tells you that just one of these songs was ever the best-selling record in the nation.

Georgia Gibbs topped the Juke Box chart on May 14, and Les Baxter topped the Jockey chart. Neither song reached #1 on any other chart. So, kids played “Dance with Me Henry,” the DJs played “Unchained Melody,” and consumers bought more copies of “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” than any other record. Which is the most legitimate hit? The DJs’ playlists often involved politics and prejudice. Five cents for the jukebox was not much of an investment to make in a song. Plunking down the full price for one’s own copy of a single strikes me as the most sincere form of support for a song, so I think Pérez Prado can already claim to have the biggest hit in the nation this week.

The week’s debuts are among the most significant ever. First, June Valli brings us the fourth version of “Unchained Melody” to grace the Best Sellers. The other three are much higher, with Baxter at #2, Hibbler at #5, and Hamilton at #9. June is in fact a One-Week Wonder at #29; she doesn’t hit either of the other charts at all. She will be back with another Top 40 hit in 1960, and anyone who has heard an old Chiquita Banana commercial knows her voice.

Now that the charts are consolidated and artists get a period of time when they can promote a hit undistracted by cover competition, you have to wonder just how big the Les Baxter version of “Unchained Melody” would have been, had there been no drain on its sales. The Righteous Brothers version, still ten years away, with a resurgence in 1990, is proof of the song’s strength, no matter who sings it. Look for my version at iTunes shortly.

The other debut is really a re-entry that has taken a year to chart again. Recorded on April 12, 1954 and released on May 10 of that year, the single, Decca 29124, has been gathering dust after selling a reported 18,000 copies and charting at #23 for one week on May 29, 1954. In the meantime, the author of the song’s guitar solo has fallen down a set of stairs and died (on June 17, 1954), and an actor, Glenn Ford, has swiped the record from his son Peter’s collection to show the honchos of his next movie what kids are listening to. The film is The Blackboard Jungle, and the song is “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets.

In other news, Eddie Fisher debuts on the Jockey chart with “Heart,” from Damn Yankees, which also gives us “Whatever Lola Wants.” The Jockeys will give Eddie the #6 slot eventually, while sales will peak at #15.

May 19, 1956: This “Heartbreak Hotel” thing is starting to get old, but here we have Elvis atop all four charts again.

Talk about stagnation: the Best Sellers chart has no debuts, with a number of songs flipping and flopping but not dropping. Over at the Top 100, one Top 40 debut of note is “A Little Love Can Go a Long, Long Way” by the Dream Weavers featuring Wade Buff. This single is a One-Week Wonder, but the Dream Weavers can console themselves with memories of their previous Top Ten hit, “It’s Almost Tomorrow.”

May 20, 1957: Between the 1956 and 1957 charts, Elvis has 8 #1 spots. Not bad work.

Unlike 1956, we have some interesting 1957 debuts this week. First up is “Start Movin’ (In My Direction)” by an actor who is branching out, Sal Mineo. Sal will chart four songs (two as Best Seller flips), and this one will reach the Top Ten, but don’t let all that success lull you into believing that Sal sings well. He’s no Caruso, more like a Fabian.

An iconic group hits the charts for the first time this week. The Coasters debut “Young Blood,” with “Searchin’” as its flip, this week. Both songs will reach the Top 100 Top Ten, but in the fourth week on the Best Sellers chart, the record will flip, and “Searchin’” will be considered the A-side for the remainder of the run.

May 19, 1958: The Everly Brothers have made the #1 spots all theirs, as “All I Have to Do Is Dream” is the consensus #1 now.

As for debuts, the Best Sellers give us “High Sign” by the Diamonds, which will creep into the Top 40 on two charts for one week each; the mildly creepy “Teacher, Teacher” by Johnny Mathis, the intense “Rumble” by Link Wray, already a Top 40 hit on the Top 100, and, at an encouraging #18, “Secretly” by Jimmie Rodgers. Its flip is the future One-Week Wonder “Make Me a Miracle.”

May 18, 1959: Wilbert Harrison dashes the hopes of several potential #1 hits by leaping from #6 to the pinnacle. He will get two weeks at the top, and none of the songs he jumped will get there (barring the song he replaced, The Happy Organ”).

I’ll list all of the debuts, which can be noted for their lackluster qualities: “Lonely for You,” a future #24 peak for One-Hit Wonder Gary Stites; “Someone,” a future #35 underperformer for Johnny Mathis; and “I’ve Come of Age,” a future #28 hit, based on a melody from Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony, by One-Hit Wonder Billy Storm. As I said, there’s nothing amazing here, unless “hard-to-find” equals “amazing” in your world. In mine, it just means “annoying.”

For your listening pleasure, it’s time to celebrate the “Unchained Melody” phenomenon. All five of the hit versions, for your edification. I chose the stereo mix of the Righteous Brothers version.

For Wednesday, I’ll bring you the postponed discussion of a piano player many of us know by name—only. See you then!

Les Baxter and His Orchestra, Unchained Melody

Al Hibbler, Unchained Melody

Roy Hamilton, Unchained Melody

June Valli, Unchained Melody

Righteous Brothers, Unchained Melody

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 19: Chuck Willis’s Weeks

2009-05-10T00:44:00.001-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

Long-running #1 hits and seasonal songs mark this week’s charts..

May 7, 1955: While “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” by Dámaso Pérez Prado and His Orchestra spends its second week at #1 on the Best Sellers chart, this monster is #4 on the Jockey and Juke Box charts. In fact, it dropped from #2 to #4 on the Jockey chart, an aberration that will correct itself soon. Radios and juke boxes are still cranking “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” by Bill Hayes more than any other single.

Two pop mainstays debut songs this week: Nat “King” Cole hits the Best Sellers with “A Blossom Fell,” and Frank Sinatra climbs aboard the Jockey chart with “Learnin’ the Blues.” Walter Schumann’s version of “Davy Crockett,” which has earned airplay since early April without showing much in the way of sales, is now a Best Seller, debuting at #29. It will drop to #30 next week, then disappear.

Lest I be less than complete with the 1955 debuts, I’ll note the arrival on the Best Sellers of “Boom Boom Boomerang” by the DeCastro Sisters, Peggy, Babette, and Cherie, who hail from Cuba. This gem won’t chart on the radio, but the populace will bypass the jockeys and take it onto the Juke Box chart shortly.

May 12, 1956: Elvis has elbowed his way past Perry Como’s “Hot Diggity” on the Jockey chart, and “Heartbreak Hotel” is now a consensus #1 hit. It will stay that way for three weeks, and then the Jockeys will opt for a slow instrumental as its successor. Everyone but the DJs will continue to keep Elvis atop the charts for a while after that.

The debuts this week are somewhat lackluster, with “The Church Bells May Ring” by the Diamonds and “Can You Find It in Your Heart” by Tony Bennett moving well on the Top 100. Neither song will reach the Top Ten anywhere. A song that will reach the Top Ten for two artists now has both versions on the Best Sellers chart: “Long Tall Sally” by Little Richard and Pat Boone. For once, the unsanitized R&B version is making a greater dent on the Jockey chart, at least for now.

May 13, 1957: It’s “here we go again” time at #1, as Elvis tops all four charts with “All Shook Up.” It’s the third of 6 weeks as a consensus #1.

A debut that will not reach the Top Ten attains the bottom rung of the Best Sellers this week. It’s “C.C. Rider” by Chuck Willis. This event is interesting in a number of ways. First, while the single’s sales have elevated it into the Best Sellers, weak airplay has dropped it from #59 to #71 this week on the Top 100. It will rebound to #46 next week, but the huge drop must have given the Atlantic people a case of the sweats. Next, Willis is just eleven months away from dying at age 30 of peritonitis from a perforated ulcer. Two of his four pop hits will be posthumous. Also, “C.C. Rider” is an update of Ma Rainey’s 1925 hit, “See See Rider Blues.” Her hit features Louis Armstrong on cornet and Fletcher Henderson on piano. Willis took the song to #1 on the R&B chart, exceeding Ma Rainey’s #14 chart performance. LaVern Baker and the Animals will take the song into the pop Top 40 as well. Finally, “C.C. Rider” is the record that teens use to develop a new dance called the Stroll. And we all know what that led to.

May 12, 1958: This is a great week to be a #1 pop single. If you are one, you are either the lovely “All I Have to Do Is Dream” (Everly Brothers, Best Sellers), the romantic “Twilight Time” (Platters, Jockeys), or the bouncy, fun “Witch Doctor” (David Seville, Top 100). Not bad.

The Best Seller debuts this week reflect the free-wheeling playlists that made Top 40 radio so much fun for so long. One debut is “Torero” by Renato Carosone, a One-Hit Wonder from Napoli, singing one of the few Top 40 hits sung in Italian.

Right above Carosone is the debut of the posthumous, final Top 40 single from the aforementioned Chuck Willis. The single’s trajectory is an odd one. The song eventually considered the flip, “Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes,” charted first, entering the Top 100 on April 28, 1958, 18 days after Chuck died. Two weeks later, May 12, the other side, “What Am I Living For?,” entered the Best Sellers as the A-side, with “Hang Up” listed as the flip. Both songs are in the Top 100 now; “Hang Up” will stall at #24, but “What Am I Living For?” will reach #9. In August, Chuck’s final Top 100 single, “My Life,” will reach #46 on the Best Sellers.

Another debut in which I have personal interest is Pat Boone’s “Sugar Moon.” I owned this single as a child, but I chose not to feature it last year in my series of posts about my collection of 45s. It’s headed for #5, and it simply was one of the least quirky 45s in my collection, so it didn’t make the cut. If you really want my take on this record, ask for it, and I’ll give it to you.

A big jumper, debuting on the sales charts now after peeking into the Jockey chart last week, is “Big Man” by the Four Preps, an eventual #3 hit. This follows a #2 smash, “26 Miles (Santa Catalina),” and ensures that 1958 will be quite a year for the Four Preps.

The Top 100 sees a new kind of song reach its Top 40 this week. The first power chord, courtesy of the unlikely Cadence label (think Chordettes, Everly Brothers and Andy Williams), reaches our ears via Link Wray & His Ray Men, who bring us “Rumble.”

May 11, 1959: You can’t get any cheerier than this week’s #1 tune, “The Happy Organ” by Dave “Baby” Cortez. The #2 song, which will be leapfrogged by the next #1 hit, is about being sorry.

Debuts include a song that extols the virtues of (presumably) a woman and, 30 years later, will extol the virtues of a cooking oil. Lloyd Price’s “Personality” is destined to become a commercial for Wesson oil. It’s the only Top 40 debut this week.

For your listening pleasure, a celebration of the work of Chuck Willis, accompanied by the original “See See Rider Blues.” Note the spacious, clean recording of “C.C. Rider.” I’m not sure we’ve ever improved on the sound quality of the best analog recordings.

For Wednesday, I’ll discuss a piano player many of us know by name—only. See you then!

Chuck Willis, What Am I Living For?

Chuck Willis, C.C. Rider

Ma Rainey, See See Rider Blues

A Rare Peek Inside Sunshine Pop

2009-05-06T00:02:00.004-05:00

A week ago, I was deeply involved in the task of eradicating parking meters in St. Cloud, Minnesota’s Downtown. The dust has settled a bit in that area, and now that we have all of the merchants on the petition and an endorsement from the newspaper, all I have to do is wait until the petition hits the City Council agenda in a couple of weeks. For now, I get to write a post I have anticipated for a long time.

A bit over a year ago, I wrote a post about a favorite song from my childhood, “Washington Square.” Shortly thereafter, I was able to converse with the song’s composer, Bobb Goldsteinn. We have become friends, and frankly, hanging out with such an artist in his hometown, in an area (South Street in Philadelphia) that certainly contributed to his composition, makes listening to the song a whole new experience.

Beyond “Washington Square,” though, my source for most of my early Bobb Goldsteinn data was a website devoted to the GoldeBriars, a fountain of pre-Mamas & Papas sonic delight that is now known as Sunshine Pop. The website tells a bit of the story: how Curt Boettcher, Dotti Holmberg, Sheri Holmberg, and Ron Neilson left Minneapolis for New York, signed with Epic Records, released a couple of LPs, and went about their business, leaving as their legacy the prototype for the Mamas & the Papas.

The website also mentions that Dotti was a thorough diarist and archivist of the band’s triumphs and travails—and that she had collected everything into a multimedia ebook.

Some aspects of the GoldeBriars’ story linked into my personal music experience: Bobb Goldsteinn, of course, who produced some of their recordings, and Curt Boettcher, who, you may know, has been acclaimed as the most innovative and talented vocal arranger ever. Ask whiteray what he thinks of a Boettcher-arranged vocal classic, “Cherish” by the Association.

With that incentive, I ordered the ebook, The GoldeBriars’ Story: Whatever Happened to Jezebel?. I promised Dotti that I would review it on this blog. The time has arrived for me to make good on that promise.

Thanks (or no thanks) to several editorial jobs and my participation in publishing ventures, I have been exposed to a lot of raw book manuscripts, as well as published works not vetted by major New York publishing houses. In many cases, the result is a less-than-spectacular offering that is hard on the eyes and ears of someone with an editor’s mindset. Such is not the case with Dotti’s book.

The organization of her thoughts is compelling, with an essentially chronological chapter structure that is interspersed with observations about the milieu in which the GoldeBriars performed and recorded. Dotti’s creative control takes the book far out of the realm of canned music biographies and makes for a refreshing change in music-history literature.

Dotti begins by telling how she left Hugo, Minnesota and met Curt Boettcher, who was singing in a Minneapolis coffee house. Dotti, Sheri, and their brother, Gary, had their own group, but when they joined in on an audience sing-along, the coffee-house manager made them take the stage with Curt, and thus began the GoldeBriars.

After their first management screw, the GoldeBriars learned to live on rice, and from then until they reached New York with a Minneapolis-based manager who cared about them, that’s pretty much what they ate. One day, they acquired a mascot, a carved idol named Jezebel, who give the book its title. Jezebel went everywhere with the GoldeBriars after her arrival.

The story is told primarily in Dotti’s voice, but there are excerpts from Curt Boettcher’s diary, as well as scans of newspaper articles, artwork that includes Curt’s cartoons, and numerous photographs. One rarity is a sketch of Curt and Dotti singing that was drawn by Rolf Harris, the Australian singer who scored a #3 hit here with “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” on Epic shortly before the GoldeBriars signed a contract with that label.

The GoldeBriars began their recording sessions on November 21, 1963. On this day, Bobb Goldsteinn’s composition was #2 in the nation, thanks to the Village Stompers. Bobb and the GoldeBriars had not yet met, but as label-mates of the Village Stompers, Curt and crew would soon do so.

The next day, prior to their evening recording session, the quartet walked around New York and noted the grief on everyone’s face. That was how they learned that the president had been shot. Dotti evokes the day in her memoir with grace and candor; she goes on to say that the band showed up for their recording session that night, as they felt they had to go on with their lives.

Epic Records rolled out a solid promo campaign for their first LP in early 1964, only to find that new folk-pop acts were shut out of the public consciousness with a bang when the first Beatles recordings hit the airwaves. Their LP sold reasonably well, but it wasn’t the monster hit it could have been a couple of months earlier.

The act did make it onto ABC’s Hootenanny, and the video of their appearance is on the ebook CD. From there, they were introduced to Bobb Goldsteinn. As Dotti puts it, they were dropped in Bobb’s lap “and he didn’t stand up fast enough.” He polished their stage act, gave them songs to add to their repertoire, and took them to Miami to perform. Not a bad deal.

Their schedule led them to a huge stay in Charleston, followed by Milwaukee. Eventually, they disbanded. (There’s a lot left out there.)

Part of Curt Boettcher’s musical expertise stemmed from his background in Japanese kabuki, which he studied when he lived with his family in Japan. As a result, the GoldeBriars developed a love for, and were loved by, the Japanese people. Dotti’s book shows great respect for the group’s entire fan base, as the PDF file of the text appears in both English and Japanese.

This chronicle of life on the road, of being almost a national phenomenon, as told through the words of a naïve Minnesota girl, is a fascinating collection of thoughts that goes far more deeply into the world of underpaid and physically neglected musicians than any sanitized biography you will find on the shelves of bookstores.

Between the scans of photos, clippings, and memorabilia, adding in the video of their TV performance of “Saro Jane,” which shows just how creative Curt was at arranging vocals (and how talented Dotti and Sheri were at producing the sounds he wanted), this ebook is a true gem, and I recommend it to everyone who loves this era in folk and pop music.

You can see the overview of the GoldeBriars story on Dotti’s website. There you will find Bobb Goldsteinn’s foreword to Dotti’s ebook. The link to a tribute to her brother, Gary Holmberg, including four of his recordings, is here. You can acquire the folk-music film in which the GoldeBriars appeared, as well as a CD compilation of Dotti’s solo recordings, here. And, finally, do yourself a favor and obtain the ebook at the same page. No work I have ever read gives a better street-level view of life in the music world of 1963-65.

Some video to whet your appetite:

Here you can see how relentless Curt was in making the most of vocals on even simple melodies. Truly amazing.

Dotti, from her compilation, singing a song produced by Curt.

Dotti again. Here I detect a touch of pre-Paula Abdul vocal inflection (which is a good thing).

And "Tell It to the Wind," a song from their second album. Bobb Goldsteinn wrote it with Jeff Barry, and Bobb produced it.

For Saturday, it’s Week Nineteen of the Great 1950s Chart Meltdown. See you then!

GoldeBriars, Tell It to the Wind

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 18: Dark Moons

2009-05-03T20:39:00.004-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

Long-running #1 hits and seasonal songs mark this week’s charts..

April 30, 1955: An historic run begins atop the Best Sellers chart. “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” by Dámaso Pérez Prado and His Orchestra, from the film Underwater!, climbs from #2 to #1 there. The song is still stuck at #9 on the Juke Box chart, which has a slower reporting cycle, but it’s at #2 on the Jockey chart. It will be an eventual consensus #1, and even after a huge hit knocks it down to #2 on the Best Sellers in July, it will hold that spot for two weeks. Bill Hayes hangs in at #1 the other charts.

One song debuts twice this week, with the Crew-Cuts besting Nappy Brown in the race up the charts of “Don’t Be Angry.” The Crew-Cuts also have the advantage of a Best Sellers flip, “Chop Chop Boom,” which aids the overall sales of the single.

Riding on the Pérez Prado coattails is Alan Dale, who has persuaded the Jockeys to play his vocal version of this week’s #1 Best Seller.

May 5, 1956: “Heartbreak Hotel” still is not a consensus #1, as “Hot Diggity” moves from #2 to #1 on the Jockey chart. Radio will put Elvis over the top next week.

Among the debuts is “The Wayward Wind” by Gogi Grant, which begins its Best Sellers run at an inauspicious tie for #23. The romanticism of cowboys and other free spirits is still a recipe for success on the charts, and this tune’s destiny is to spend 8 weeks at #1.

Fats Domino comes aboard with a solid two-sided single, “I’m in Love Again” and “My Blue Heaven.” “I’m in Love Again” is destined to be Fats’s second-highest charting Pop single behind “Blueberry Hill,” reaching #3. “My Blue Heaven” is a revival of a 1927 Paul Whiteman hit.

The biggest debut is “The Happy Whistler” by Don Robertson, which climbs from #51 to #25 on the Top 100. Classified as an instrumental despite the pervasive human sounds, the song is one of the few Top 40 hits scored by an artist born in Beijing. Robertson will whistle his way up to #6.

April 29/May 6, 1957: The dating on the charts changes this week. Prior to the April 29, 1957 issue of Billboard, there was a ten-day gap between the end of a chart survey period and the issue date. As late as April 27, 1957, the magazine came out on Saturdays. They then produced an issue for Monday, April 29, which created a five-day turnaround on chart data. Billboard will be issued on Mondays until Saturday, January 6, 1962. The magazine will remain a Saturday magazine from that point on. This shift accounts for the fact that, in Whitburn, some songs debut on April 27, 1957 and others on April 29.

For both issues, “All Shook Up” sits atop all four charts. That will be the case into June, so there’s not much else to say about contenders.

The 1957 debuts are fun this time. Rolling around in various stages of debutness are four versions of a ditty called “Pledge of Love.” Johnny Janis will take this, his only Top 100 hit, to #63. Dick Contino, an accordion whiz who appeared with Horace Heidt in the 1940s, will almost break through, but he stalls at #42. Far more interesting to me is the Mitchell Torok version. His agreeable voice made a hit of “Caribbean” twice, and I featured him last year, thanks to a single of his called “(The Land of) Bobby Beeble,” which is still one of the creepiest songs I have ever heard. Torok takes “Pledge of Love” to #25.

And then we have the winner, the #12 version by a 20-year-old One-Hit Wonder named Ken Copeland. If you channel-surf thoroughly and pause for a few seconds on each channel, you will have run into a very intense televangelist named Kenneth Copeland. And yes, you would be listening to the same guy.

A competing version of a really good song, “Dark Moon,” has crept into the Top 40 of the Top 100. Gale Storm, of that successful cover label, Dot, will eventually take the song to #4, while Bonnie Guitar, née Buckingham, hangs in there with a peak at #6. I suspect that, free of the Storm cover, Bonnie Guitar’s version would have been a cinch to go to #1.

Beginning the road to a #2 peak is the Marty Robbins tune “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation).” After some frustration at having Guy Mitchell cover two of his country hits, including “Singing the Blues,” which spent 10 weeks atop various charts in 1956-57 and undercut the Robbins version, Robbins hired Ray Conniff to produce “A White Sport Coat” for him. Eventually, this song would be iconic enough to merit mention in “American Pie.”

On May 6, we find the debut of a cover of a Fats Domino hit that is past its peak at #4: Ricky Nelson’s version of “I’m Walking” is his debut single, and it will equal the performance of the Domino version. Even better for Ricky is the upcoming emergence of the flip, “A Teenager’s Romance,” which will reach #2.

May 5, 1958: Sped-up vocal mania continues as “Witch Doctor” maintains its hold on the #1 Best Sellers and Top 100 spots. It won’t reach #1 on the Jockey chart, but it stays at #2 there for a solid amount of time.

The big 1958 debut is nothing less than Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” It leaps onto the Best Sellers at #22 and jumps 47 spots to #20 on the Top 100. This song will earn Chuck his fourth straight Top Ten hit, and it will be his last Top Ten peak for six years.

May 4, 1959: “Come Softly to Me” gives the Fleetwoods a four-week run at #1. They will be back in late 1959 with “Mr. Blue.”

The debuts run from the classy “Endlessly” by Brook Benton to the educational “Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton. Somewhere in the middle lies a typical pop number by one of the most versatile artists ever to hit the charts, Bobby Darin, whose “Dream Lover” will reach #2 as a precursor to a huge hit later this year.

For your listening pleasure, two looks at the Dark Moon, by Bonnie Guitar and Gale Storm, sound good. And for the quirkiness of the experience, let’s listen to future televangelist Ken Copeland’s take on “Pledge of Love,” which shows his voice to good advantage.

For Wednesday, look for the postponed musical book review that honors the Sunshine Pop era. See you then!

Bonnie Guitar, Dark Moon

Gale Storm, Dark Moon

Ken Copeland, Pledge of Love

Take What? Pave What?

2009-04-28T22:09:00.002-05:00

At this very moment, I am probably being more productive overall than at any time in my life. That would be great, if I were a high-powered CEO, equipped with an exit strategy and a cottage in the West. And I don’t mean the Pacific Coast.

Most of my productivity is getting me slaps on the back rather than money, which is fine for proving my claim that I am not overly materialistic. But the juggling I am doing is making me delay by a week a post I have waited to put together for several months. I am hopeful that next week it will see the light, but the research is time-consuming, and I am not available to do it correctly today.

So, I may as well get back into my wheelhouse and write about what I know: my childhood musical experiences. One memory relates to one of my current time-consuming projects, so I’ll tell you about that as well. I won’t jump away from this year’s blog premise, either; the artist I am featuring has a female vocal lead. Here we go.

I lived in Bloomington, Indiana from August, 1978 to July, 1998, with some short forays into the real world (Mexico, Indianapolis, Gary). When I got to Bloomington, I went downtown a few times to check it out; they were filming the Academy Award-winning film Breaking Away then, which made downtown seem appealing. But the reality was different: As is the case with most Indiana county seats, Bloomington had a courthouse on a square. The square was wall-to-wall old buildings, some of which had active storefronts. The others, like the former Kresge store, stood empty. The commercial action was all at College Mall.

By 1983, the square was truly dying. A glance at the newspapers of the time show talk of demolishing the courthouse to try to build something that would appeal to consumers. Horrified preservationists stepped in, and the courthouse still stands. But what to do about the terrible economic situation of the heart of Bloomington?

Someone looked around and said, “Let’s take out the parking meters. The Mall advertises its free parking as a selling point, and we get complaints daily about having to plug a meter to shop downtown.” The city put bags over the meter heads for a few months, and investors, shop-owners and customers began to flood the square. The city removed the meter heads, and eventually it sawed off the poles at sidewalk level. Downtown Bloomington is now the cultural and commercial center of South Central Indiana, and there isn’t even an interstate shunting traffic into it.

That lesson was not lost on me when I walked down St. Germain Street in St. Cloud, Minnesota. In the downtown area, there are 327 parking meters. If you park, you pay. If you decide to stop downtown but aren’t carrying coins, you don’t stop. There are about 11 empty storefronts on that street.

It turns out that the St. Cloud Downtown merchants have been begging the city to ditch the meters for years. But their pleas were based on instinct, rather than hard evidence that a meter-free Downtown would be a successful Downtown.

And then, this February, I lost a quarter in a defective meter. I was not offered a refund. I wrote to the mayor, and I told him about the Bloomington Renaissance and the role of meter removal. He had me put on the Parking Committee agenda. I went to Bloomington, took a lot of photos, turned them into a PowerPoint presentation, and the Parking Committee ran with the concept.

From there, it was easy work to get the Downtown Merchants on board. The Downtown Council is using the momentum to full advantage, with stunning results. Soon, the proposal, complete with a unanimous merchant petition, will be taken to the City Council, where I will present my PowerPoint essay for the fourth time. If the vote is what the Downtown Council hopes it will be, we will bag the meters, use essentially the same parking formula that made Bloomington rich, and recreate St. Cloud’s Downtown. All without spending any money on a consultant to tell everyone what they already knew: what worked in Bloomington will work here.

That means that I have been out getting signatures on the petition. The merchants of St. Cloud’s Downtown are very excited. It is a good feeling. But I couldn’t get to the media item I wanted to review for today’s post.

I’m done writing on what I know about St. Cloud in 2009. The topic reminds me, though, of a song that has caused me occasional embarrassment since I lived in Gary in 1970.

It was August of that year, and I was staying at my Aunt Eileen’s house then, mostly in the company of my cousin Bob. I wrote a lot about them last year, because so many of my personal-soundtrack songs came from that summer and that house.

One of the songs I left out last year was a lively cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” I heard the version by the Neighborhood a lot on WLS, though it spent just 4 weeks in the national Top 40, beginning with its debut on August 8. It climbed only to #29, which should have meant it got no airplay on WLS. Not so. It peaked at #11 on the WLS survey. (The week it reached #17, it was billed as “Bi Yellow Taxi.”)

Bob didn’t sing a lot, but he sang this song. That’s what has gotten me into trouble over the years. Bob’s lyrics went like this (the words can’t even be a mondegreen): “Take down a bank, put up a parking lot.”

His sister, Lois, told him repeatedly that the song referred to “paradise.” Bob didn’t remember that, but I did. However, I figured she meant that the lyrics were “Take paradise, put up a parking lot.”

Inevitably, I sang that line in the presence of a Joni Mitchell fan, circa 1986, in Bloomington. Her gleeful, shocked, mocking laugh still rings in my ears. And on the rare occasions that I am expected to quote the line in question, I tend to say, “Take—pave paradise, put up a parking lot.”

Thanks, Bob.

It took me until last summer to get the song, as recorded by the Neighborhood, known in Whitburn as a “seven-man, two-woman pop vocal group.” The two women are in the foreground of the vocal arrangement. Given some recent covers of the song, you might think you hate the thing. But I like this peppy version. Thanks to my parking-issue time crunch, I’m not going to research the group further.

Well, I couldn’t help but sneak a peek. Joni wrote it about seeing a parking lot in the distance while she was in Hawaii. There you go.

Fortunately for me, while I’m wandering around St. Cloud’s Downtown, this song does not run through my mind. At least, it hasn’t so far.

If I need more excuses for delaying the post I wanted to write today, I’ll tell you about the Barbeque Saga.

Saturday, I’ll bring you Week Eighteen of the Great 1950s Chart Meltdown. See you then!

The Neighborhood, Big Yellow Taxi

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 17: A Multitude of Instrumentals

2009-04-25T13:00:00.004-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

As spring really arrives in Minnesota, it’s time to listen to bird calls and reflect on a bunch of cover records.

April 23, 1955: Bill Hayes still rules the #1 spot on all three charts, but the all-important Best Sellers chart is poised to welcome a new #1 next week. That song will be the biggest #1 of the 1950s, and no one will log more weeks atop the charts until 1992.

This Best Sellers chart shows that, despite its definition as part of the Rock Era, it is really part of the estuary between “old” music and Rock and Roll. Debuting on the Best Sellers is a song by a big band, Art Mooney and His Orchestra, “Honey Babe.” Also appearing for the first time are Roy Hamilton’s take on “Unchained Melody” and a Broadway tune, Sarah Vaughan’s “Whatever Lola Wants” from Damn Yankees. Dinah Shore, one of the classic 1940s singers, will eventually chart a cover of this tune as further proof that we are not out of the woods when it comes to music for the previous generation.

April 28, 1956: We are truly in the Elvis Era now. His first hit single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” reigns on the Best Sellers for the second week, though he still is looking up at Les Baxter’s “Poor People of Paris” on the other three charts. Perry Como is also outperforming him on the Jockey and Juke Box charts at #2 with “Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom),” an eventual #1 Jockey hit. Apart from the eventual 8 weeks that “Heartbreak Hotel” will top the pop charts, it’s worth noting that this single will be a #1 Country hit for 17 weeks. Four of his Sun sides charted on the Country list before his first Top 40 pop hit.

Just a pair of debuts have reached the Best Sellers this week. The Four Lads’ intended follow-up to “No, Not Much!” is “My Little Angel,” which debuts at #22. However, next week, the single will sort itself out, and the flip, “Standing on the Corner,” will start to dominate. “My Little Angel” is peaking this week, but the flip will shoot to #3 this summer.

This is a huge time for instrumentals. Apart from “Poor People of Paris,” represented by Les Baxter, Lawrence Welk and Russ Morgan, we see “Moonglow and Theme from Picnic” in Morris Stoloff and George Cates versions. (An eventual vocal version of “Picnic” by the McGuire Sisters will feature lyrics by Steve Allen, who played piano on the George Cates instrumental version of “Autumn Leaves.”) Another current instrumental is “Main Title (Man with the Golden Arm)” as recorded by both Elmer Bernstein and Richard Maltby. This song is also covered by Dick Jacobs (“Main Title and Molly-O”). The McGuire Sisters’ flip to “Picnic” is “Delilah Jones,” taken from the melody of the Bernstein hit. Don’t forget Nelson Riddle’s “Port au Prince” and “Lisbon Antigua,” the latter covered by Mitch Miller, and the slow-dropping “Theme from the Three Penny Opera (Moritat)” by Dick Hyman. This musical conjunction leaves me without words.

Thank goodness we have some real rock and roll joining the fray: “Blue Suede Shoes” in an Elvis (Presley) cover, and “Long Tall Sally” by, well, Pat Boone.

April 27, 1957: The #1 spot on all four charts is “All Shook Up,” which takes care of the previous weeks’ turmoil.

Coming back to haunt us is a “Banana Boat” cover, this time with intentional comic relief by Stan Freberg. Bonnie Guitar, who will eventually own a successful indie label, debuts on Dot with “Dark Moon.” A welcome throwback is the Top 100 surge of Rosemary Clooney’s “Mangos,” her final Top 40 hit. Not much else is going on this week.

April 28, 1958: The gospel musings of “He’s Got the Whole World (In His Hands)” by Laurie London still top the Jockey chart, but in addition to having been preceded by “Tequila,” this song is now rivaled by the pagan posturing of David Seville’s “Witch Doctor,” which leaps to #1 on the Best Sellers and the Top 100.

Best Sellers debuts were looking pretty pale until I read all the way up to #9, where “All I Have to Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers starts its successful quest for the top spot. The best evidence of the song’s initial impact is on the Top 100, where the record leapt from #69 to #7.

April 27, 1959: The #1 song this week, “Come Softly to Me” by the Fleetwoods, is indeed soft, an anomaly in a week where the Top Ten is full of peppy tunes. Some of the tunes are corny (“Venus” by Frankie Avalon, “Pink Shoe Laces” by Dodie Stevens), but you can’t deny their energy.

This week marks the beginning of the Exotica wave. “Quiet Village” by Martin Denny shoots into the Top 40 in its third Hot 100 week. Soon, this and other tunes laden with bird calls and African percussion will be gracing not just the airwaves, but the turntables of millions of Hi-Fi sets in bachelor pads around the country. Eager young men will be serving martinis, wet or dry, to their potential conquests, all thanks to Martin Denny. It seems to me that there was an uptick in baby boys named either Martin or Denny in the early 1960s. Now we know why.

Another strong debut is “A Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts. Jumping from #69 to #34, it’s the first eventual Top Ten for these guys. Despite the huge debut, it’s not the biggest one of the week: that belongs to none other than Edward Byrnes, with some help from Connie Stevens. Yes, friends, rocketing from #72 to #25 is “Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb),” which instructed a generation of teens and pre-teens in the proper method of acquiring head lice.
For your listening pleasure, let’s have a listen to a couple of the true quirks of 1950s hit-making: the baby-engendering Exotic Sounds of Martin Denny and the louse-spreading kitsch of Edward Byrnes. After all, it’s spring.

For Wednesday, look for a musical book review that honors the Sunshine Pop era. You’ll love it. See you then!

Martin Denny, Quiet Village

Byrnes & Stevens, Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)

The More Things Change . . .

2009-04-21T21:30:00.000-05:00

In the earliest days of the recording industry, master recordings could reproduce a severely limited number of copies. Therefore, an artist would have to record a popular hit hundreds of times to replace worn-out masters. It was also customary for artists to record the same song for more than one label. Often it is possible to keep track of the recording date of a take, but that information doesn’t always accompany mp3 files.

For that reason, it is very difficult for me to know exactly which of the early recordings I own is the oldest in my collection. I am fairly confident that the song I am featuring today, “Turkey in the Straw” by Billy Golden, is my oldest recording, even if it is not as old as the song’s original chart date: October 17, 1891.

Several details about this recording fascinate me. First, Billy Golden was born before the Civil War began. Second, when he sang about a horse breaking the tongue of a wagon, he was singing about the only conveyance he was likely to know. These days, if an old-time group sings “Turkey in the Straw,” it is a quaint exercise in how things used to be. Billy could easily visualize the song’s scenario from his daily life, and there really was no alternate reality for him.

Born William Heins in Cincinnati in 1855, Billy developed a significant vaudeville career for himself. That made it easy for him to transition to a recording career, though chances are good that his live performances were more perky than his recordings, especially once Billy got up to around one hundred takes or so.

Billy was a specialist in two types of early recordings: the laughing song, and what is now recognized as racist content. The laughing song involved the artist chortling loudly over the instrumental parts of the song, perhaps to encourage laughter from a live audience, perhaps to pull some chuckles out of those who listened to the recordings. Either way, the laughter sounds forced to me.

As for racist content, there’s a small chance that some recordings were a celebration, rather than a mockery, of African-American life. I won’t try to make a case for that point of view, but I can say that racism was so deeply embedded in American culture that it’s difficult to find a pioneer artist whose body of work is untainted by it.

Billy died in 1926, with 6 chart hits to his credit. “Turkey in the Straw” reached #1 for seven weeks at a time when there were few data to analyze and little competition for the top spot.

A characteristic of this and virtually all early recordings is a phenomenon that has returned in the 2000s: at the beginning of the record, the title and artist were announced and, in this case, the label was also announced. The person announcing this recording for Edison Records is Thomas Edison. Nowadays, as songs are cranking up, often rappers will give their name and tell us who is singing with them. As you can tell, the idea is not a new one.

And one other idea that has returned as of 2006 is the melody of “Turkey in the Straw.” The melody, with the parody lyric “Do Your Ears Hang Low?,” was further parodied as “Chain Hang Low” by Jibbs (Jovan Campbell), and the single entered the Top 40 on August 26, 2006, reaching #7.

While we all know about sampling and retreads of songs that are just a few years old, the idea that a hip-hop artist based a song on a 180-year-old melody intrigues me. Give the songs a listen, and meditate on how vast a space the creative tableau is in the world of music.

For Saturday, it's Week Seventeen of the 1950s Chart Meltdown. See you then!

Billy Golden, Turkey in the Straw

Jibbs, Chain Hang Low

1950s Chart Meltdown, Weeks 14-16: All Comfy

2009-04-19T01:11:00.004-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

A few historic events are taking place in the April music charts of the 1950s, so let’s catch them up.

April 2/9/16, 1955: The Bill Hayes version of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” rules the Best Sellers chart for all three weeks. Not so with the Juke Boxes and Jockeys—the McGuire Sisters top both charts for all three weeks with “Sincerely.” Hayes will eventually make his chart-topper unanimous, but the sisters are holding on for now.

Among the April 2 debuts is one that puts the song in question into a select group. This is the third version of “Make Yourself Comfortable” to chart in the Best Sellers. While the Sarah Vaughan version, which debuted on 11/27/1954, reached #6 on the Jockey chart and #8 on the Best Sellers and Juke Box charts, the Peggy King version and this one, by a guy named Andy Griffith, each spent one week in the Top 40 on the charts, and for both artists, it was their only week in the Top 40 in the Rock Era. So, the song spawned not one, but two One-Week Wonders.

How did the song accomplish this feat? Well, though it is not as creepy as “Go On with the Wedding” or as stalky/murderous as “The Little Blue Man,” this tale of a woman who is using all of her feminine wiles to seduce a seemingly naïve young man is not truly compelling drama. Andy Griffith takes advantage of that slight tackiness, as his is a comedy version where he deconstructs the sexual tension. It is, for that reason, the best version of this song, which should have made even 1955 audiences snicker, even in its most serious versions. For the record, the vocalist on the Andy Griffith cover is Jean Wilson.

April 2 also brings complexity to the singles charts, as this is the last week of individual chart positions for flips on the Best Sellers and Juke Box charts. The Top 100 will continue to show individual chart action for double-sided hits, but from now on, when a Best Seller wanes, labels will try to push the flip in order to buoy a record’s chart performance.

In contrast to the cover weakness of “Make Yourself Comfortable,” April 9 brings us the first two versions of a 4-song 1955 smash, “Unchained Melody.” Les Baxter, His Chorus and Orchestra enter the Best Sellers one spot behind Al Hibbler, but Baxter will take the song to #1, with Hibbler stalling at #3. Once all four versions have charted, I’ll feature them here.

April 16 produces yet another One-Week Wonder, the Laurie Sisters, with the unforgettable “Dixie Danny.” Yay for the Laurie Sisters!

April 7/14/21, 1956: Les Baxter dominates the #1 slot, owning three of them with “Poor People of Paris” and leaving one to Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz” on April 7. Kay’s 6-week run atop the Juke Box chart ends on April 7, but the kids still waltz at the soda shop for several more weeks.

A significant April 7 Best Sellers debut is Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” an eventual #6 hit that will spend 8 weeks at #1 on the R&B chart. This is Little Richard’s breakthrough hit.

Three versions of “Ivory Tower” are on the way, with the Cathy Carr version debuting on April 7 and climbing eventually to #2, a major coup for a 1-hit artist on a Cincinnati indie label (Fraternity). Her big competition, from Gale Storm, is also a Top Ten hit, on Dot. The Charms (listed on the charts as Otis Williams) round out the artists charting this song.

This is also the week that Dean Martin climbs to #31 on the Top 100 with “Innamorata.” He featured the song in a Martin Lewis film, Artists and Models. A Jerry Vale cover pales by comparison, of course.

One of the older One-Hit Wonders of the Rock Era debuts on April 21, with “Moonglow and Theme from Picnic.” It’s Morris Stoloff, in his 20th year at the helm of Columbia Pictures music, who decided in an inspired moment to resurrect the 1934 #1 Benny Goodman hit “Moon Glow” and merge it into the theme from the recent Holden/Novak hit film Picnic. Stoloff will take his instrumental to #1.

April 6/13/20, 1957: The four #1 spots are a mess during April, 1957, as Perry Como’s “Round and Round,” Tab Hunter’s “Young Love,” and “Butterfly” by both Andy Williams and Charlie Gracie, claim a slot atop at least one chart. Coming along soon to consolidate the charts is “All Shook Up” by Elvis (Presley), which debuts at #9 on the Best Sellers on April 6 and jumps to #1 there on April 13.

April 13 marks the end of an era, as the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, now recording for Fraternity Records, charts Jimmy’s final hit. “So Rare” will reach #2 on the Jockey and Top 100 charts on June 17 and 24, respectively, just days after Jimmy’s death from throat cancer. He recorded the sax part in November, 1956 and died on June 12.

April 7/14/21, 1958: With “Tequila” at #1 to start the month, seeing that song replaced by a gospel tune “He’s Got the Whole World (In His Hands)” by Laurie London), is sort of like reinstating Prohibition, I think. But the Platters balance it out on April 21 when they climb to #1 with “Twilight Time.”

Ricky Nelson leads the way on the April 7 debuts with “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” If this doesn’t sound like one of Ricky’s brighter moments, maybe it’s not. It was the intended A-side, it seems, but the Whitburn books’ rule is to list as the A-side the song that charts higher between two songs that debut on the same date. Thus, the eventual bigger hit was “Believe What You Say.” Does that work better?

Showing his radio power, Dean Martin debuts on the Jockey chart at #20 with “Return to Me.” He is tied for #50 on the Best Sellers and tied for #53 on the Top 100. Clearly, radio was ready for another Dino tune.

An iconic R&B tune hits the Top 40 (#27) and the Best Sellers (#29): “Book of Love” by the Monotones. Despite the song’s inclusion in bunches of anthologies and the reference to it in “American Pie,” the Monotones did not hit the pop Top 40 again.

Moving on to April 14, an odd juxtaposition of debuts occurs on the Best Sellers. Frank Sinatra re-enters the Top 40 with “Witchcraft,” while David Seville debuts one notch higher with “Witch Doctor,” the precursor to the Chipmunks franchise.

The highest debut on this date, though, is at #7: “Twilight Time” by the Platters. It’s no surprise, then, that April 21 will find “Twilight Time” atop the Best Sellers.

Another huge debut comes aboard on April 21, and it’s one of the Elvis (Presley) songs that sound far too contrived for my tastes. I don’t know anyone who is a big fan of “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” but evidently it seemed to be a good idea at the time, as it debuted at #9.

A lesser April 21 debut but a still-recognizable tune is “Chanson d’amour,” by Art & Dotty Todd. This was their only U.S. Top 40 hit, but they had a thriving Las Vegas career, and they owned a supper club in Hawaii for a number of years, so they probably didn’t notice the lack of ongoing hits.

April 6/13/20, 1959: Frankie Avalon gives way to the Fleetwoods’ “Come Softly to Me” atop the Hot 100, but “Venus” will hang in the Top Ten for several more weeks.

The Fabian Era is truly underway now, with “Turn Me Loose” earning its Top 40 debut at #39 after entering the Hot 100 at #79 on March 30. The song will be his first Top Ten hit.

The big debut for April 13 is a song with a sad provenance: “Three Stars” by Tommy Dee (Donaldson), with singing by Carol Kay, written by Eddie Cochran, is a tribute to the victims of the Clear Lake, Iowa plane crash on February 3, 1959. The song enters the Top 40 at #21 in its third week in the Hot 100.

While April 20 provides us with several mildly recognizable Top 40 debuts, I think it’s more important to note the Hot 100 entry of “Wang Dang Taffy Apple Tango” at #62. The artist? Could it be anyone other than Pat Boone?

Nope.

For your listening pleasure, make yourself comfortable and enjoy three hit versions of “Make Yourself Comfortable.”

For Wednesday, I am considering bringing you the oldest recording I own, a #1 hit from 1891. I may decide against it, as there’s not a lot of biographical information on this artist, but I’ll see what I can do.

Sarah Vaughan, Make Yourself Comfortable

Peggy King, Make Yourself Comfortable

Andy Griffith, Make Yourself Comfortable

Who Ate Us? Hy Ate Us.

2009-04-14T22:59:00.005-05:00

I have doggedly blogged each Wednesday and Saturday since January 1, 2008. I missed Saturday, April 4, and that opened me up to the temptation to take a short hiatus. I wasn’t burned out; a number of extracurricular (i.e. non-blog) projects reached the tipping point in the same short stretch of time. I didn’t think it would matter, but I got a few “what’s up” emails and an unnervingly consistent hit rate. So, to those of you who stopped by and found yourselves reading the same post for two weeks, I apologize. I am also grateful for the fact that you kept looking.

Now, let me tell you what I intended to tell you on Saturday, April 4. If you look at the previous (April 1) post, I discussed an artist named Mik Tap who releases all of her recordings backwards. Well, as it turns out, I masked the goal of that profile pretty well, as no one who asked me about her realized that it was an April Fool’s Day joke (not that any of you are fools). The singer is named Patty Kim, and she has been a mainstay of the Korean Adult Contemporary scene for some 50 years. The two songs I posted were two Korean-language recordings: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the “Do Re Mi” song from The Sound of Music.

Maybe you still see some humor here: Although the Republic can easily be construed as the Republic of Korea, if you wish, I can’t imagine how the puns of the Do Re Mi thing translate to Korean.

How did I get the Patty Kim Greatest Hits CD? When I worked at Tracks Records in Bloomington, Indiana, a guy came in, wanting to sell the CD as a used item. The store had no use for it, but I thought, “You never know when you might need a CD in Korean.” So I gave him two bucks for it, and my co-worker said I really made the seller’s day.

Well, two years later, I was tutoring an exchange professor in English. He was, of course, from South Korea, or this would be quite the digression. After a few sessions of English practice, I remembered the Patty Kim CD, and I pulled it off the shelf. He exclaimed, “Patty Kim!” and he sat, mesmerized, through the entire CD. At one point, he cried. So that was two dollars well spent.

I am posting the songs in their original format, below. A number of the recordings on the CD are in English, and her English is far more than passable. It’s really not a bad collection, if you enjoy cabaret music, and she is an icon of Korean pop. God bless Patty, and Mr. Cho, who cried when she sang.

And now, I want to bring up a female artist who is not quite breaking news. Most everyone will have heard her by now, but if I introduce her to even one new listener via this blog, I will consider the time and space worthwhile.

If you have ever watched American Idol, the U.S. counterpart to Britain’s Got Talent, you probably encountered the phenomenon of William Hung, who turned his shocking inability to sing into a recording career. We fixate on train wrecks, it seems.

Within the past few days, April 12, I believe, Britain’s Got Talent was doing auditions in Scotland for the upcoming season. You probably know from watching the auditions for American Idol what that tends to mean: people appear who can’t sing but sadly have been informed by their families and friends that they should go for it. Simon and the gang then have a good chuckle at their expense.

The British show has no age limit, unlike the U.S. show, so in the Scottish auditions, a matronly 47-year-old woman, unemployed and unkissed, stepped out in a modest dress and high heels to sing a song from Les Misérables, which she mispronounced. Simon rolled his eyes. Here we go, everyone thought.

And there we went. If you don’t already know this video, please watch the entire prelude to her performance, and listen to the song, and let the reaction of Simon and the other judges wash over you. It is really an unforgettable experience. If you saw it elsewhere, enjoy the event again. If you have not yet heard of Susan Boyle, don’t thank me for bringing her to your attention, as I owe my own acquaintance with her experience on stage to a string of people.

There’s no embedding allowed, so click here to see the video in another window.

So, there’s that, and I’ll get back to the 1950s charts for Saturday. See you then!

Patty Kim, Battle Hymn of the Republic

Patty Kim, Do Re Mi

The Vortex of Incompetence, or Cleverness Beyond Measure?

2009-03-31T22:36:00.003-05:00

I’m writing about female artists every other Wednesday, and you may well imagine that not every singer in my collection is a flawless songbird. Since I am now writing when it’s still Women’s History Month in the USA and April Fools’ Day to points east of here, it seems the perfect time to bring up women who have become part of the historical record while becoming the butt of its jokes.

In recent years, such people as William Hung have made a fortune off their lousy singing voices. Our appetite for artistic train wrecks isn’t as new as “reality” TV, however. I offer you a couple of 1960s artists, as well as one who is still cranking ’em out, but in the oddest way of them all.

The first artist is a sister act, and many of you know their work. I’m sure, though, that even some thorough music fans will have managed to miss the Shaggs.

Begun as a trio of Dot, Helen and Betty Wiggin, later adding sister Rachel, the Shaggs were put onto the musical treadmill by their father, Austin, while they were schoolgirls. It had been predicted by Austin’s mother that his daughters would form a band, and he went for it with the single-minded fervor that only those who believe they are fulfilling prophecy can achieve. He even took his girls out of school so they could spend all of their time working on their music.

And what music it was. When their album, Philosophy of the World, was released in 1969, the few people who heard it thought it was a joke, or at least really awful. One hundred copies seem to have survived of the thousand LPs pressed. One copy belonged to Tom Ardolino of NRBQ, and the band used its pull to get Rounder Records, of all people, to reissue the album in 1980. Then, it received critical notice, but not acclaim.

At first listen, the music sounds like some little kids beating on pots and pans and screeching. But I, having heard the songs before and revisiting them for this essay, have come to agree with Cub Koda, the erstwhile Brownsville Station front man who went on to become a stunningly cogent music critic (primarily for All Music Guide). He says:

“The guilelessness that permeates these performances is simply amazing, making a virtue out of artlessness. There’s an innocence to these songs and their performances that’s both charming and unsettling. Hacked-at drumbeats, whacked-around chords, songs that seem to have little or no meter to them (“My Pal Foot Foot,” “Who Are Parents,” “That Little Sports Car,” “I'm So Happy When You're Near” are must-hears) being played on out-of-tune, pawn-shop-quality guitars all converge, creating dissonance and beauty, chaos and tranquility, causing any listener coming to this music to rearrange any pre-existing notions about the relationships between talent, originality, and ability. There is no album you might own that sounds remotely like this one.”

I listened to the songs carefully, and I now note that Helen’s drumming is not as random as it seems, and the guitar parts are rehearsed, if not good. Thus, the songs are reproducible in their recorded form, which means the girls intended to do what they did. They even stopped the recording and told the producer when one of them had messed up. Mind-boggling, but true. That leads me to ask: were these recordings signs that a higher form of life had arrived on Earth, dealing out tunes that mere humans could not appreciate? What if the collapse of the music industry means that all music will eventually sound like these songs?

You will love the broad Boston accents, which rival those of the Jamies (“Summertime, Summertime”) and, in a similar vein, the Jersey non-rhotic vocalizations of the Royal Teens (“Short Shorts).

If you have an open-minded ear (?), you will eventually learn to appreciate the messages and the arrangements of the songs I have brought to the blog. For contrast, I am also including a 1975 recording of a song not composed by Dot Wiggin (the first album was all her work), “Wheels,” which shows the girls in a far better light technically. At the end of that one, nevertheless, you catch a glimpse of the original Shaggs chaos coming through. The contrast makes me think they really did know what they were doing on their original compositions. If you do enjoy their work, you are in good company: Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain ranked their LP as one of their favorites.

Love ’em or not, you will have to admit that their original songs are not the same type of train wreck that “Photograph” by Ray Conniff is. He should have known better, whereas the Shaggs clearly did not. (Thanks to whiteray for this timely musical revelation.)

The next joke was perpetrated on the suspecting American public in 1966. Mrs. Miller, whose first name was Elva and whose actual last name may have been Connes, rather than Miller, warbled her way into a Capitol Records contract as a bit of comic relief from her stablemates, the Beach Boys and the Beatles. According to Wikipedia, she became offended when she realized that Capitol was actually making fun of her, but she got over it. Her album sold 250,000 copies in three weeks, far more than almost all of us have sold of our own work.

Mrs. Miller said that her production team chose the worst, rather than the best, takes of the songs she sang. And perhaps you know what became of her album, Mrs. Miller’s Greatest Hits: It spawned two Hot 100 singles (links below) and is a cherished collector’s item. Mrs. Miller died in 1997 at age 89.

But the real oddity in my collection is an enterprising woman named Mik Tap, who, perhaps to hide a voice as odd as those of the previous artists, releases all of her recordings backwards. Her website claims that there is an “ethereal beauty to the backward masking of the songwriters’ original intent.” I don’t know about that, but when I listened, I know I did not hear anything as sinister as the mutterings alleged to emerge from playing “Stairway to Heaven” backwards. But then, the reverse of a stairway to heaven is a descent into hell, while the Mik Tap songs can’t possibly be an attempt to mess with the inner workings of our minds. Can they?

For Saturday, we’re up to Week Fourteen of the 1950s charts. See you then!

The Shaggs, Philosophy of the World

The Shaggs, Who Are Parents

The Shaggs, My Pal Foot Foot

The Shaggs, Wheels

Mrs. Miller, Downtown

Mrs. Miller, A Lover’s Concerto

Mik Tap, Im Er Od

Mik Tap, BHOTR

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 13: Lucky for Some

2009-03-28T11:18:00.002-05:00

The Clarinet As Vehicle to Stardom

2009-03-24T21:58:00.000-05:00

These days, the drum machine is the “instrument” that helps an “artist” sell “records.” From 1955 until a few years ago, it was the electric guitar. During the 1960s, there was a stretch when a cheesy organ or a horn section would do the trick.

From the 1930s through the mid-1950s, there were actually competing bands that based their sound on the clarinet. Woody Herman fronted a band as a clarinetist, as did Artie Shaw. But the biggest, best, and most creative of them all was the jazz clarinet virtuoso Benny Goodman.

I didn’t grow up listening to Big Band music, but in the 1960s, Benny Goodman’s name, if not his recordings, were still part of the American pop-culture vernacular. As sometimes happens on this blog, I am probably writing for the under-40 set when I write the basics about Goodman’s career.

Benny was born in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrants. By the time he was 16, he had joined the orchestra of Ben Pollack in Benny’s hometown, Chicago. He was successful enough before he turned 20 that he tried to get his father to retire from his job in the Chicago stockyards. Instead, his father continued working, only to be killed by a car in 1929 as he stepped off a streetcar. He never saw Benny’s greatest success, and that loss affected all of the Goodman family.

In the early 1930s, Benny began working with a superb African-American pianist, Fletcher Henderson, and the result was a hotter form of jazz than what music fans were used to. His band was about to fold in 1935, when a couple of trajectories converged.

Benny’s band had been playing on a late-night radio show in New York called Let’s Dance. Few in New York listened to it, because it came on too late. The West Coast jazz crowd learned about Benny via that show, which aired at a listenable time there. When he took his band on the road, they wound up at the end, both literally and figuratively, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. Ready to disband if they didn’t make a hit there, the band used the Fletcher Henderson charts they had used on the radio, as well as Henderson’s huge hit, “King Porter Stomp,” to turn the indifferent audience into an explosive, dance-crazy crowd.

After three weeks at the Palomar, playing for up to 8,000 people, Benny was officially reigning over the Swing Era as the King of Swing. And he did it all with a clarinet. By January, 1938, Benny and his band were big enough to play Carnegie Hall. There, they recorded their most iconic performance, “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing).”

Given his musical longevity, it should come as no surprise that Benny tried out a number of different band structures. One of his more significant groups was a sextet that featured the early electric-guitar work of Charlie Christian. Beginning in 1938, Benny began recording Mozart, and after that, he commissioned clarinet works by Béla Bartók and Aaron Copeland, among others.

The 1955 film The Benny Goodman Story provided Benny with some amusement, but it contained a lot of good music, recorded by Benny, who was portrayed in the film by Steve Allen. If you want to know the Hollywood version of Benny’s life, check it out.

Benny died on June 13, 1986, and he left behind one of the largest legacies of any Depression-era artist. Of his 164 chart hits, 16 went to #1, including the two-sided 1936 hit “It’s Been So Long”/“Goody-Goody.” He worked with many huge stars of the Swing era: Gene Krupa, Bunny Berigan, Harry James, and numerous others.

If you don’t know his work, here’s a taste of it. In addition to the three songs listed below, here’s a 1937 film of the band in action, including drummer extraordinaire Gene Krupa:

For Saturday, we’re up to Week Thirteen of the 1950s charts. See you then!

Benny Goodman, King Porter

Benny Goodman, Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)

Benny Goodman, Goody-Goody

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 12: A Tale of Two Cities

2009-03-21T10:48:00.000-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

In the course of human events, into each life some snow must fall. And apart from that, sometimes pages in a book stick together. If I had been reading a novel when that happened, I might have noticed. But I was preparing to go off to attend a conference in Chicago, and one music chart looks a lot like another, so how was I to know I was looking at the chart for March 31, 1958, rather than March 24?

Look at the date on the chart, you think to yourself. Yeah, I know. It doesn’t matter, though, because I have still managed to figure out a way to write a post about a song that hasn’t hit the Top 40 yet.

I have to write about this song because it’s the only song I brought with me that coincides with the 1950s charts for Week Twelve. When the 1-terabyte external hard drives creep below $100, I will buy one and use it to store my whole music collection. Then, if I remember to take it on business trips, I will be able to overcome glitches caused by crisp paper and inattention.

So, I’m in Chicago. It’s spring here, like everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, but when I was walking to the Hyatt by the Chicago River, the air was really cold. Not much colder than Week Twelve of the 1950s charts, however. The debuts this week have had little staying power: there’s yet another Davy Crockett version, this one by Tennessee Ernie Ford (March 19, 1955); another version of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” by Gale Storm, a Best Sellers debut on March 24, 1956, “Mama Look at Boo Boo” by Harry Belafonte on March 23, 1957; and “This Should Go On Forever” by Rod Bernard on March 23, 1959 (it didn’t go on forever, obviously).

With such a thin crop to feature, you can imagine that I was pleased to find that, during Week Twelve of 1958, a future #1 hit by a One-Hit Wonder jumped into the Top 40 at #12, after entering the chart the week before at #61. It also leapt onto the Best Sellers at #13 in its debut week there. And radio loved this song; in its second week there, it climbed from #15 to #11.

Of course, I was looking at Week Thirteen when I decided this song deserved the spotlight for this post. Fortunately for me, March 24, 1958, Week Twelve, is the official debut date for the song, thanks to the DJs. My approach to this series normally would be to wait until the song made a dent in the sales charts on March 31, but I’m stuck now.

And so, since this is the one smash debut for Week Twelve, let me tell you about “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” by Laurie London.

First of all, the song owes its status as a #1 hit to radio. While it raced up the Best Sellers and Top 100 charts to #2 very quickly, “Twilight Time” by the Platters, and then “Witch Doctor” by David Seville, shut it out of the top sales spot. But the Jockeys made it #1 for 4 weeks, so it’s pretty legit. (Note to Wikipedia editors: the summary there says he spent 4 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but the chart did not yet exist, and he did not top any sales chart.)

And where did Laurie London go after this auspicious debut? Well, he stayed home in London, and that seems to be what he did wrong.

Laurie was just 14 when he released this gospel tune. He looked like a wholesome London boy with a clean face and a bright smile. His accent showed in his vocals, which made him exotic to Americans, I’m sure. He was the first British artist to hit #1 on any American chart in the Rock Era.

All of the online bios are brief, which is a pity, as I can’t confirm a career quirk about which I read in a Rolling Stone guide or in a #1 hits book. When Capitol picked up his single from Parlophone for U.S. release, there was “encouragement” to have Laurie tour the United States to back this hit and subsequent smashes. His dad didn’t want him to come over, and that was probably a wise choice for the long-term mental health of little Laurie. (Think Britney, Lindsay, et al.)

But if Laurie really wanted to have a music career, and his 42 other recordings would make one think he did, his dad blew it for him. Unless the book I read was lying, or I got the story wrong. Laurie even tried singing a lot of songs in German, including “Itsy Bitsy Teene Weenie Honolulu Strand Bikini,” which sounds like sexy English, but “Strand” is German for “beach.”

However the scenario played out, American record-buyers were denied a look at Laurie, and so they blew him off. We are still left with this unusual, all-inclusive gospel tune, taken to #1 by a London boy named London, while America’s gospel queen, Mahalia Jackson, only managed #67.

For Wednesday, I’ll bring on the postponed Benny Goodman feature. See you then!

Laurie London, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands

St. Paddy's Day Special: Traditional Music/Ceol Traidisiúnta

2009-03-16T21:33:00.000-05:00

To those expecting a Really Old Music post today: To my surprise, a lot of people came to check out the post of Irish music. The visits are still going on, and I don't want to distract anyone who comes to read it, so I'm going to leave things alone until Saturday. Look for Benny Goodman next Wednesday. Thanks!

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This is a special St. Patrick’s Day post. The regular Saturday post is below this one.

This is just a short note to celebrate some of the good music I know from Irish and Irish-American artists. The mini-bios in English are mine, and the Irish ones (see below) are from Vicipéid, the Irish-language Wikipedia.

Dervish are from County Sligo. Their lineup includes Brian McDonagh (mandola), Liam Kelly (flute, whistles), Tom Morrow (fiddles), Shane Mitchell (accordion), Cathy Jordan (vocals, bodhrán, bones), and Michael Holmes (bouzouki). I first encountered them at the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival in Bloomington, Indiana, several years ago. They have been recording copiously since 1989. My favorite song of theirs is “An Spailpín Fánach,” from End of the Day (1996). Shane McAleer is the fiddler on this tune.

Solas is the Irish word for “light.” The Irish-American group that took the name has produced nine albums since 1996. Like light through a prism, the members have scattered over time: only Séamus Eagan (flute, whistle, bodhrán, etc.) and Winifred Horan (fiddle) remain from the group that recorded Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers in 1997. From that album, I have selected “Aililiú Na Gamhna” for you. At the time, the group’s vocalist was Karan Casey, from Co. Waterford, who now enjoys a successful solo career.

The Chieftains, to state the obvious, are the trad band of greatest renown. Apart from their work as a group, beginning in 1963, they have collaborated with a number of artists, including Elvis (Costello), Mick Jagger, Ziggy Marley, and Tom Jones. I discovered them (late) in 1978, when I picked up their album Chieftains 9: Boil the Breakfast Early in part because it included a delightful tune called “Seán Ó Duibhir a’Ghleanna” (Seán O’Dwyer of the Glen). If you didn’t know my full name before, you do now. I fell in love with the tune “Carolan’s Welcome,” composed by Turlough O'Carolan (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, 1670-1738), a blind itinerant harper. The tune seems not to have been named by Carolan, but by the Chieftains, who played it for the Pope’s arrival in Ireland. The song offered me my first taste of music on the uilleann pipes, “uilleann” referring to “elbow” and being a relative of “ulnar.” Paddy Moloney played them here.

There’s plenty more to listen to, but if I get going, I won’t ever stop. The song links appear after some Irish text.

Dervish: Banna traidisiúnta ó gContae Shligigh in Éirinn ab iad Dervish. Bunaíodh an banna seo sa bhliain 1989. Roghnaíodh Dervish mar iarratasóir na hÉireann sa Chomórtas Eoraifíse don bhliain 2007, ach críochnaigh Dervish in áit deireanach na Chomórtais.

Chieftains: Grúpa ceoil traidisiúnta Éireannach atá ar na Chieftains, a bhí bunaithe sa bhliain 1963. Is iad Paddy Moloney, Michael Tubridy, Matt Molloy, Kevin Conneff, Seán Keane, Martin Fay, agus Derek Bell na baill a bhí ag seinm leis an mbanna i rith na blianta. Is é Moloney atá ina cheannaire ar an mbanna, agus is eisean a scríobhann nó a chóiríonn an chuid is mó den saothar atá acu.

Bhí Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin (25 Márta 1670 - 1738) ina chruiteoir, cumadóir is ceoltóir caoch. Thaisteal sé timpeall Éire ag seinm agus ag canadh leis a saoithre féin agus indiu tá cáiliúil air mar sin. agus d'éag sé ar an 25 Márta 1738 i Ros Comáin. Cláirseoir a bhí ann a chum cuid mhaith dá chuid ceoil féin, chomh maith le dánta éagsúla. Thosaigh sé ag foghlaim an cheoil nuair a chaill sé radharc na súl ag 18 mbliana d'aois, agus chuaigh sé ag taisteal ar fud na tíre ag seinm agus ag cumadh ceoil do phátrúin éagsúla. Agus é ag seinm i dtithe na n-uaisle chuala sé ceol Iodálach agus chuaigh an stíl nua sin i bhfeidhm ar a chuid cumadóireachta féin. Mar gheall ar a dhaille ní fhéadfadh sé ceol a léamh ná a scríobh ach mhair timpeall dhá chéad píosa a chum sé sa traidisiún. Rinne Seán Ó Riada agus daoine eile athbheochan ar cheol Uí Chearbhalláin sa dara leath den fhichiú haois agus tá an-cháil ar phíosaí ar nós "Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór" agus na píosaí a dtugtar 'plancstaíplanxty' orthu.

For Wednesday, some Big Band clarinet virtuosity. See you then!

Dervish, An Spailpín Fánach

Solas, Aililiú Na Gamhna

Chieftains, Carolan's Welcome

1950s Chart Meltdown, Weeks 10-11: Halloween in March?

2009-03-14T19:53:00.000-05:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

I’m back on track for my discussion of the 1950s charts. There’s nothing pulling me away from St. Cloud for an extended period of time, so I have my references books here to make this post work. Some good things have been happening in the charts, so here we go.

March 5-12, 1955: On all three charts for both weeks, “Sincerely” by the McGuire Sisters has a lock on #1. Fess Parker’s version of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” comes aboard on March 12, and two versions still wait in the wings.

The Sarah Vaughan version of “How Important Can It Be?” jumped up 9 spots on March 5, and it seemed to be giving the Joni James cut some serious competition. However, a drop of 7 spots for March 12, with an uptick for Joni James, shows that Joni’s eventual Top Ten recording is the stronger of the two sides.

March 10-17, 1956: An epic moment in pop music chart history arrives this week. I don’t believe I can overstate the significance of the March 10 arrival on the Best Sellers chart (#19) and the Top 40 (#28 after its Top 100 debut at #68 the previous week) of “Heartbreak Hotel” by E. Presley. This is the first of 153 chart singles, 114 of which will teach the Top 40, with 18 reaching #1 and 6 more stopping at #2. But although “Heartbreak Hotel” is destined to peak high, on March 17 it climbs only to 15 on the Best Sellers, from 14 to 12 on the Jockey chart, and to 21 on the Top 100. It still doesn’t register on the Juke Box list.

March 10 is also the debut week for an iconic Perry Como tune, “Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom).” Perry was reportedly not fond of doing novelty numbers, but they were his bread and butter in the 1950s. The flip, another uptempo number called “Juke Box Baby,” is strong enough to peak at #10 on the Top 100, though it is relegated to Best Seller Flip status on that chart.

On March 17, a real blast from the past takes a one-week peek at the Top 40 charts when the Benny Goodman Trio with Rosemary Clooney reaches #20 on the Joke Box chart with “Memories of You.” The song stalled at #52 on the Top 100 and did not show up on the airplay or Best Sellers charts. Benny charted 164 times between 1931 and 1953, and when the film that chronicled his life came out in 1956, Benny was still valid enough to get the recording gig that led to this final hit.

March 9-16, 1957: Perry Como comes up with another big debut on March 9, as “Round and Round” opens at #13 on the Best Seller chart. The jockeys had moved on the record the previous week, and now it shoots from 24 to 12. The radio play helps boost the Top 100 performance from 32 to 19.

Elsewhere, March 9 is Fats Domino’s first Best Seller week with “I’m Walkin’,” whose #4 performance will be matched in May by a kid who gets a boost from his family’s TV show, Ozzie and Harriet.

March 16 brings us a Diamonds smash, “Little Darlin’.” Competition arrives for “Party Doll” by Buddy Knox with the Rhythm Orchids . . . in the guise of Steve Lawrence. You can imagine the disparity between those versions. Even so, Steve jumps onto the Juke Box chart at the same time as Buddy’s version, and Steve’s version will peak at #5.

March 10-17, 1958: This is the debut week for “Tequila” . . . by Eddie Platt. It won’t go as far as the Champs version, which jumps from #23 to #12 on March 10. And in a huge leap for a Best Seller in those days, the Champs go all the way to #1 for March 17.

March 10 is the Best Seller debut for “Maybe Baby” by the Crickets, at #27, and the Top 40 entry date for “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” by Danny and the Juniors. In her second and third Top 40 weeks ever, a newcomer named Connie Francis jumps from 19 to 7 on the March 10 Top 100 chart. The song has quite a chart history: Five artists charted with it in 1923, and Harry James did so in 1946. Still to come is Marie Osmond in 1975.

The Best Sellers chart for March 17 shows how eclectic the Top 40 was in the 1950s. Debuts include a song in gutter Italian, Lou Monte’s “Lazy Mary (Luna Mezzo Mare),” John Zacherle’s “Dinner with Drac,” and “Lollipop” by the Chordettes. I think I’m going to have to put “Dinner with Drac” on the blog so you can tell me if you find it amusing, considering its novelty status.

March 9-16, 1959: The Hot 100 serves up a bittersweet Top 40 debut on March 9, as a posthumous Buddy Holly single, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” climbs from #45 to #36. There are some other recognizable debuts: Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise,” Dodie Stevens’s “Pink Shoelaces,” and, way up at #19, “Never Be Anyone Else but You” by the kid from the Ozzie and Harriet show. The flip, “It’s Late,” enters the Top 40 on its own merit on March 16, shooting 91-44-21 at the same time that the A side scrambles from #19 to #9 on the 16th. Ricky Nelson was pretty big then, eh?

“La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens, which had dropped out of the Top 40 on February 23, got a boost from the events of February 3rd, moving back to #37 on March 2, and #28 on March 9. That’s all it can do, as it drops back to #41 on March 16. No, wait: it will get one more push back to #30 on March 23, and then it will really go away, ending Ritchie’s presence in the Top 40, but not the Hot 100.

The really huge debut of the week takes a #55 debut into the Top 40 at #16. The song is “Come Softly to Me” by the Fleetwoods, the debut single for the trip from Washington state, and soon their first of two #1 singles. They show the softer side of the chart; Ricky Nelson and Ritchie Valens have had two-sided records, a rock side and a ballad side, get a lot of airplay. Soon, the loud stuff will back off, and the early 1960s will be very mushy, until the kids get tired of that and embrace the Beatles.

For your listening pleasure, I would like your opinion of the concoction of John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle, who hosted horror movies in Philadelphia as an ersatz Bela Lugosi, which enabled the local Cameo label to sign him and make him a national star . . . for a few weeks. Again, is his recording funny? Note that the sax is pretty hot; it’s the Applejacks backing his song.

Here he is (with lettering spelling his name “Zacherley”) on vintage TV. This medium seems to suit him better:

And how can I bypass the one Rock Era week that Benny Goodman spent in top Top 40? And with Rosemary Clooney singing, you can’t go wrong. Frankly, his clarinet sounds as sweet as it ever did.

For Wednesday, expect Really Old Music from Benny, as well as a bio. But you should consider stopping by on Tuesday, March 17, considering that I’m Irish and such. See you Tuesday and Wednesday!

John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle, Dinner with Drac, Part 1

Benny Goodman Trio with Rosemary Clooney, Memories of You

Music from Another Cold Place

2009-03-10T23:52:00.000-05:00

Before I start, here is some sad news: Jimmy Boyd, whom I featured here last December, died Saturday (March 7) at the age of 70. I send my heartfelt condolences to his family.

This evening, it is 9 degrees F. (-13 C) in St. Cloud, Minnesota. We’re headed for a low of -9 F. (-23 C). The change sounds much more drastic in Fahrenheit than in Celsius, and it should. After a few days of 68-degree (20 C) weather in Indiana, returning to Minnesota just in time for a near-blizzard is a distressing experience.

Six hours east of here, it is 3am in Stockholm, and the temperature is 28 F. (-2 C) there. It’s true that Stockholm is on the Baltic Sea, but I would think that, at the end of winter, the water would keep the air cooler, as Lake Michigan does for Chicago this time of year. I am doubly, perhaps triply, offended at the current warmth of Stockholm in comparison to my landlocked town.

Sweden comes to mind for a couple of reasons. First, I have a lot of neighbors whose families trotted over here from Sweden or Norway several generations ago. Second, I’m thinking how much better those people’s bodies seem to be adapted to March blizzards than mine is. I am just two generations removed from a temperate island in the North Sea that is green year round. I don’t have enough body fat to keep me toasty. I just shaved the beard I grew all winter, a beard that kept the winter chill off my face. I guess I’ll use a scarf in the morning when the wind drives ice particles at my cheeks.

Maybe, then, moving to a place that Swedes found comforting in the winter was not my best idea ever. But I like Sweden, its people, and its music. Regular readers know I appreciate the music of a Swedish act, ABBA, enough to feature them on the blog. But ABBA went the way of most of my favorite bands more than 25 years ago. Current pop music has become another somewhat bleak landscape.

When I was looking for acts to fill the space left empty by ABBA, the Eagles, Elton John, and the J. Geils Band, among others (I had already replaced the Beatles with Elton John), I gave other Swedish acts a look. I found Roxette acceptable; I know that one blogger friend has never quite gotten them, but I think “It Must Have been Love” is a priceless and exquisitely produced bit of bittersweet pop. That made two Swedish acts I could listen to without cringing. But Roxette drifted away as well.

I tried expanding my world view to Norway, but the band Dance with a Stranger, complete with a lead singer named Elg, didn’t work too well for me. Back to Sweden, I learned to love Väsen, but they are more folk and World Music than pop, which is where I live.

And finally, I learned of yet another Swedish female vocalist, this time a solo singer, whose album found its way into my regular listening cycle.

On a 1993 album titled Shapes (Epic Sweden 473737), Josefin Nilsson gave me another Swedish voice to enjoy. Sounding gritty, more like Roxette’s Marie Fredriksson than ABBA’s Fältskog or Lyngstad, she carried the songs chosen by her producer farther than they might have gone with a lesser voice. The album was pop, not leaning toward jazz or folk. It was a solid follower of ABBA and Roxette and worthy of a place in that genealogy.

Data in English on Josefin Nilsson is, at this point, thin, so I resorted to the Swedish Wikipedia for help. She was born in 1969 in Alvare, on Gotland, an island south of Stockholm in the Baltic Sea. In 1993, she was a former member of the Ainbusk Singers, which included her sister Marie Nilsson-Lindh as well. Ainbusk contributed backing vocals to one of Josefin’s songs on Shapes. A look at the current Ainbusk website indicates that they are both in Ainbusk again.

Josefin has also appeared on the Swedish stage in a Swedish-language production of the musical Chess. She has starred in a couple of films: the 1997 Swedish film Adam & Eva, as Eva, and the 2000 comedy Det blir aldrig som man tänkt sig (noted on IMDB as “probably the best Swedish film ever”), in the lead role of Sophia.

Given her Ainbusk return and her film success, it’s no wonder that Josefin left me in the lurch after this album to seek yet again a Swedish singer to fill that niche in my ever-growing bunch of favorite musical niches. If you have suggestions for me, do speak up.

The Josefin Nilsson album that put her on my map includes some of my favorite Swedish musicians, including Rutger Gunnarsson on bass and Lasse Wellander on guitar. Anders Glenmark, who sang the chorus on Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok,” contributes vocals. The album was produced by Benny Andersson, who also contributes the keyboards and arranged the songs.

It would seem that Josefin agreed to sing the songs chosen by her producer, rather than select tunes herself. Benny Andersson co-wrote all of the songs with Björn Ulvaeus. This duo wrote Chess with Tim Rice, and they were the executive producers of the 2008 film Mamma Mia!. They wrote a number of worldwide hits between 1974 and 1982, and they earned two gold records in the United States with the #1 hit “Dancing Queen” (1977) and the #3 hit “Take a Chance on Me” (1978).

Get the latest on Josefin Nilsson at her website. In addition to the album songs, here are Josefin and Helen Sjöholm, with Benny Anderssons Orkester, singing “Jag vet vad han vill” (“I Know Him So Well”) from Chess.

And for comparison, the Elaine Paige/Barbara Dickson English version from the original cast album of Chess.

For Saturday, I will be in full command of my computing resources, so I will not have any trouble with the 1950s chart post for Week Eleven (with more details of Week Ten thrown in). See you then! And if you live in Minnesota, stay warm!

Josefin Nilsson, When I Watch You in Your Sleep

Josefin Nilsson, Where the Whales Have Ceased to Sing

Josefin Nilsson, High Hopes and Heartaches

Josefin Nilsson, Leave It to Love

Madison Time, Part 1

2009-03-08T00:22:00.000-06:00

This evening, I feel just a twinge of pity for authors who are on the road while deadlines loom. I wanted to write this blog post 24 hours ago, but I had no way to post it, so I didn’t write. Today, I was going to spend the evening at my sister’s house in Illinois and write the essay, but I saw that the weather was going to get in the way of my return home. With 2-4 inches of slushy snow expected for Madison, Wisconsin on Sunday, I had to choose between driving this evening and getting past most of the storm, or writing and driving through all of it tomorrow.

So, I took the prudent path and drove on to Madison. That meant driving through heavy rain on the Tri-State Tollway, the signs for which somehow no longer mention that the governor of Illinois is Rod Blagojevich. Then, just north of Janesville, Wisconsin, a pretty solid fog set in.

This fog was not as bad as a fog I faced in northern Iowa about a year ago. That fog was not there, and then it was, coming on as a wall of white that stretched for forty miles. I wound up renting a room two hours from home, because my speed was down to 20 miles per hour at the time.

Tonight, I was able to drive at the speed limit of 65 miles per hour, thanks to clearly painted road lines. There was just one glitch. Some guy in a silver SUV came upon me at 70 miles per hour, then he tucked himself back into my lane one car length ahead of me. That’s fine; I don’t try to impede the progress of people who prefer to drive faster than I am driving. But once this guy got ahead of me, he panicked at the darkness and slammed on his brakes. I had to do the same. I passed him.

He slowed down to about 50, and I was well ahead of him for about fifteen minutes. Then he came whizzing back up and passed me again. Then he slowed down again. I passed him again, and the next time he caught up, I was exiting at Highway 151.

I am going to assume that this guy was just a crummy driver and not some sort of vigilante or bully. I will also assume that he was not a Madison driver. I have had nothing but good experiences in Madison; last Saturday, I stopped in town and visited Famous Dave’s, a barbecue joint I happen to like a lot. This was actually the 29th Famous Dave’s I have visited. If you’re playing at home, the photo of the restaurant and other pertinent details will be posted on my website in a few days.

And tonight, the people at the Red Roof Inn set me up nicely with wi-fi and everything else I need to write this post and upload it for your listening pleasure, and perhaps your reading pleasure, though this post is mostly an excuse for not posting 24 hours earlier.

Oh, just a tidbit before I start. While I was at my sister's spectacular new house, built by the hands of her significant other, I was helping the S.O. get his Surround Sound going. To test it, he was playing the satellite radio 1980s channel. I was doodling with the wires, and S.O. said, "That's 5.1."

A bystander, not a family member, commented, "No, that's the 1980s."

That's the sort of disconnect this day has brought.

This is meant to be a post on the charts from this week in 1955-59, but I want to post it before Saturday is gone, get some sleep, and start the slog home to Minnesota so I can undo the disorganization that a week away causes, in time for school to start an hour earlier on Monday, because we need the sun to stay out an hour longer, even though it is too cold where I live to do anything with that hour, and the mornings were getting just light enough that I could rise to go to school without feeling that most of the night was still ahead of me.

Well, then: what I do want to say now about the week’s charts is that, during this chart week in 1955, the biggest #1 hit of the Rock Era, prior to “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, debuted on the sales charts. Let me note that the statement is a matter of interpretation. Guy Mitchell stayed at #1 for 10 weeks on the Jukebox chart with “Singing the Blues,” but as far as sales charts go, the longest run prior to Olivia belonged to Pérez Prado and His Orchestra with “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.”

I will do double duty on the charts next week, to make up for the lack of detail today, but I can give you a dose of detail on this song. First of all, Pérez Prado recorded many of his compositions and/or biggest hits at least twice, sometimes three times. In his corpus you will find a large number of recordings made in Mexico City around 1949-50. These recordings include the original versions of “Mambo no. 5,” “Qué rico el mambo,” known here as “Mambo Jambo,” Mambo no. 8,” and “Cerezo rosa,” literally “Pink Cherry Tree.” The first three songs were re-recorded around 1959, but “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” got its second treatment in 1954-55 for the film Underwater!

Pérez Prado didn’t write this tune; Louiguy, a Catalan composer, did, as “Cerisier rose et pommier blanc.” Mack David wrote English lyrics for the song, though the instrumental Pérez Prado version made no use of them. Alan Dale rode the coattails of the Pérez Prado version all the way to #14 with a 1955 vocal version. I was hoping to offer you that recording as well as the Pérez Prado versions, but I ordered the song too late. It may be waiting for me at home.

I am bringing you the circa 1950 Mexico City recording of the song, followed by a version (featuring Billy May on trumpet) that was recorded on August 23, 1954. Either that version was trimmed when the stereo version for the film was mixed, or the orchestra recorded a very similar version that was released in stereo in conjunction with the film.

I think of the Mexico City version as the essential version for several reasons. The orchestra was made up of Latin musicians (if my sources are correct), whereas Pérez Prado was obliged to use U.S. union musicians for the later recordings. The early version includes themes that are not brought into the 1954 recording. Finally, the ending of the older version has a jazzy chord structure that is replaced by a more pop chord blast at the end of the film recording. Less objectively, I knew the older version for ten years before I heard the mid-1950s versions.

Enjoy the songs while I sleep and then drive home. For Wednesday, I’ll talk about a European female singer who lives in one of the few places that is colder than St. Cloud, Minnesota. See you then!

Pérez Prado, Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, circa 1950

Pérez Prado, Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, 1954

Pérez Prado, Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, 1954-55 stereo

What’s Wrong with Being First?

2009-03-03T23:43:00.000-06:00

Today, I’m going to talk about a harmonic convergence that led to my interest in collecting, and eventually writing about, Really Old Music. I didn’t come by that interest naturally; even though my parents introduced me to pop music when I was two years old, the oldest music they really listened to was Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz.” Even my dad’s parents seemed to have begun their record collection in the mid-1950s, though it’s likely that they simply tossed their 78s from the 1940s when they broke. My mom’s parents didn’t seem to have a record collection at all, but her dad turned 74 when Elvis first charted, so that’s no surprise.

Since no one played Big Band music for me when I was little, it took an adult caithiseach, interested in what had Come Before Rock, some time to learn the names of the artists who made music prior to Bill Haley. Even then, I thought recorded music sort of started with the Big Bands of the 1930s, and I impressed myself one day by buying a CD compilation of Glenn Miller recordings. That foray came ten years after I began to steep myself in Celtic music, which was a necessary lateral move I had wanted to make for years.

When CD compilations of 1950s music began to abound, I bought them as quickly as finances allowed. I figured they would not stay in print forever, and I was right about that. Some of these compilations included songs that did not fit neatly into the Rock Era collection I was amassing. I found myself with a small but significant collection of songs that had charted between 1950 and 1954. The Ames Brothers, early Nat “King” Cole, and Doris Day formed part of this batch of “early” music.

If I logged my music as most other collectors did, I might still be collecting Rock Era Top 40 and gathering the occasional pre-1955 song. But when I convert my songs to compressed files, I don’t sort by artist. From the beginning, I wanted my folders to show longitudinal, rather than stylistic, variations, and so I start my file names with the date that a song entered the Top 40, according to Joel Whitburn.

That system meant that I needed to know the debut dates for the songs I owned from 1950 to 1954. It turned out that there was a Whitburn book that dealt with the matter: Pop Memories 1890-1954. I even got to make a bit of use of the book without buying it: I could see sample pages on the Record Research website, as well as on Amazon. Thus, I was able to rename my Ames Brothers songs according to their debut dates. But beyond the A artists, I was stuck.

Finally, after I drooled over that book for a couple of years without being sure it held much value for my collection, a friend decided I should own it, and I got it for my birthday. That gift opened a portal into the rest of the music story, and I, an avid collector of sound, found myself mesmerized by the data the book offered.

My first goal was to collect as much pre-1900 music as I could. Imagine: artists singing into horns about a bygone era when wagons were far more common than automobiles, or about waiting for a call from a beau on that newfangled instrument, the telephone. How cool was that?

Still, there was a definite problem with expanding my collection to the pioneer era of recording: Very little of the material was available on CD. I didn’t see how I was going to get past that hurdle, until a day that I bought a 100-pack of CD-Rs.

How would blank CDs make it easy for me to collect music from 1890? The Verbatim CD packaging included an offer for 100 free downloads from eMusic.com Ah! One hundred free songs is a good thing, and with no further obligation, even a suspicious consumer such as caithiseach could not pass up the offer.

On the eMusic site I found the entire Stax-Volt catalog, now owned by Fantasy Records, whose entire catalog, including CCR, was also there. But more to the point of this essay, there was a bunch of early music available for download. And at about 23 cents per song after the 100 free tunes, they were a bargain that I, again, could not ignore. For the past three years, I have been paying $20 a month and downloading 90 DRM-free mp3s.

This is not an ad for eMusic, though you could consider it a tip for collectors. But the beauty of getting these mp3s lay in the fact that the early recordings had a fairly narrow dynamic range, which meant that the compression of mp3 technology had little effect on the quality of the sound. The format was perfect for recordings from 1890 to 1925 or so, and these songs exist in abundance on eMusic.

So, now, I have a solid and not at all random collection of the big hits from 1890 to 1954. My Pop Memories book serves as a checklist to some degree, and it has allowed me to expose my mind to a wide variety of artists, previously known and unknown, that I would not have met were it not for the intersection of eMusic and Pop Memories.

One example of the exposure I received is my acquaintance with the first commercially recorded jazz tunes, the efforts of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Controversy swirls around this group, which was founded in 1916 to bring an extant musical idiom, New Orleans Jazz, to Chicago. The act arrived so early in the evolution of the genre that it referred to itself as a “jass” band, reworking the word to “jazz” more than a year later.

On January 31, 1917, this band made some audition recordings for Columbia. These, the first jazz recordings ever, were not released until the act had some success with Victor recordings, but the original Columbia takes of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” and “(Back Home in) Indiana” saw the light of day in late 1917.

The personnel story is convoluted and best read on Wikipedia. What needs to be mentioned here is that a lot of purists don’t like to give credit to a white act for originating a musical genre with African American origins. The same thing happens, of course, when Bill Haley and Elvis (Presley) are described as the originators of rock and roll. What can be said about the Original Dixieland Jazz Band is that they are documented as having made the first recordings that can be called jazz, and they composed as a group some of the most iconic jazz tunes of all time, including “Tiger Rag.”

Wherever you fall on the “originators of jazz” argument, the fact is that you have an opinion only if you have been able to read about early jazz, and that would happen only if you knew where to find the names of the bands that deserve to be explored. My whole point of talking every other Wednesday about Really Old Music is to enable you to know what to look for if you have any interest at all in going back in time to the early days of music.

The Pop Memories book is lamentably not available right now, but if you want to know the names of some acts worth pursuing and perusing from the old days, I’ll gladly give you some personal pointers, if you email me. Though I, as late as 2006, did not envision myself being attracted by the pioneers of music, I now find myself trying to dig up not just every Top 40 hit from the Rock Era, but every chart song ever recorded. It’s a fascinating evolution from Billy Golden’s “Turkey in the Straw” to “Chain Hang Low” by Jibbs, which uses the melody of “Turkey in the Straw.” Along the path from one version to the other, we find a lot of firsts, and I’m glad I can share with you today the first jazz recordings.

Since I am back home in Indiana for the week, it makes sense to include that song, as well as the huge smash “Tiger Rag” and the presumed first jazz recording, “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” Enjoy them, and consider taking the plunge into the past yourself.

Saturday, I’ll bring you Week Ten of the 1950s chart action. See you then!

Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Indiana

Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Tiger Rag

Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Darktown Strutters’ Ball

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 9: Two Women Singing

2009-02-28T01:00:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

This will be another slightly abbreviated post, as I am getting in the car at 7am and hightailing it out of Minnesota for a visit to my family in Indiana. I won’t skip any posts this week.

February 26, 1955: This week marks the beginning of the Davy Crockett craze. Bill Hayes joins the Best Sellers at #16 with “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Soon to come are Fess Parker, “Tennessee” Ernie Ford, and the Voices of Walter Schumann. Who will take the song to #1? Don’t peek!

Top 40 book error alert: Crazy Otto debuts this week on the Best Sellers with “Smiles.” Next week, its flip, “Glad Rag Doll,” will debut on the Best Sellers. The Hot 100 book gets the dates right, but not the Top 40 book.

Joni James debuted last week on the Best Sellers with “How Important Can It Be?,” and the answer must be “very,” as Sarah Vaughan decided to compete with the James version. Sarah’s cover debuts this week. Both singles debut on the Jockey chart.

March 3, 1956: This is the first chart week for “Bo Weevil,” but Fats Domino’s version won’t chart until April. For now, it’s the Best Seller flip of Teresa Brewer’s “A Tear Fell.” Teresa’s version will outperform the iconic Fats version on the charts. Another song has competition: “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” charts a second version, by Gale Storm, which will join the Teenagers version in the Top Ten eventually. It’s no surprise to see that Gale’s version is a white cover on Dot Records.

March 2, 1957: This is one of the huge weeks in sales chart debut history. Check out what’s new on the Best Sellers this week: “Lucky Lips” by Ruth Brown, “Walkin’ After Midnight” by Patsy Cline, “Come Go with Me” by the Dell-Vikings, “Party Doll” by Buddy Knox with the Rhythm Orchids, and “Butterfly” by Andy Williams. Add these Top 100 debuts: “Round and Round” by Perry Como and “Teen-Age Crush” by Tommy Sands, husband-to-be of Nancy Sinatra, and you can imagine how good radio sounded a couple of weeks later. “Party Doll” and “Butterfly” both reached #1.

March 3, 1958: This is another week with a lot of debuts on the Best Sellers chart, but most are less noteworthy than the 1957 debuts. “Tequila” by the Champs and “Who’s Sorry Now” by Connie Francis lead an acceptable pack of seven debuts, including the not-so-iconic “We Belong Together” by those crazy cats, Robert & Johnny. On the DJ chart, it’s the first week for “Get a Job” . . . by the Mills Brothers, who scored their first chart hit, “Tiger Rag,” in 1931.

March 2, 1959: Those two busy chart weeks are balanced by a slow 1959, as only “Please Mr. Sun” by Tommy Edwards jumps on board. This isn’t even a “new” song, as Tommy placed a different version on the charts in 1952.

For your listening pleasure, and to celebrate the opening of Women’s History Month, here are the two 1957 debuts by women. For Wednesday, I’ll take you into the early days of jazz recordings. See you then!

Ruth Brown, Lucky Lips

Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight

Bargain Bin, Part I

2009-02-24T23:02:00.000-06:00

This post was going to be about a female vocalist whose CD I picked up several years ago, a CD I didn’t rate highly, and which I was going to share with you so you could tell me why it was good. That would make me feel better about owning it for eighteen years without playing it a second time.

But I have claimed before that I can find something to like about darn near any music, and now, after much more exposure to hip hop than I had in 1991, I can truly say that there is at least one redeeming track. Before this evening, if someone told me at gunpoint to destroy one CD from my collection, this would have been the one. Now, if I were confronted with the same demand, I would dump . . . this CD, but with greater misgivings. Before, my main concern would have been the loss of an intact jewel case. Now, it would be that I had lost a party CD that could be fun to put on when everyone is beyond drunk.

I own the CD because my favorite CD store in Bloomington, Indiana, Tracks, received a load of ex-DJ CDs (remember my cutout/DJ 45s from Uncle Tom?), and they were selling some CD singles for 50 cents, and full-length albums for a dollar. I simply bought them all and took them home.

I actually liked a couple of the CDs, and one will feature here in a couple of months in an extremely positive light. But the eponymous album by Tamarah didn’t suit me. It wasn’t simply a hip hop problem, because there was other such material on the CDs I snagged. It wasn’t her voice, which is a clear soprano. I need you to help me articulate what isn’t quite right about this disc.

The cover doesn’t scream “buy me,” for one thing. Dark-brown script on tan background, with Tamarah, in a brown suede jacket with fringe on the sleeves, leaning on a brown gramophone with brown speaker horn. The liner notes . . . don’t exist. Her cover photo is on a one-sided slip of paper. (Rather, the other side is blank.)

The leadoff song is titled “Male Tender Roni,” and it is clearly an answer to Bobby Brown’s 1989 hit “Roni.” The third song is called “Satisfaction,” but it is not a Jagger-Richards composition. It, and all eight songs on this 33-minute opus, were written by Amos Larkins II.

Knowing the songwriter keeps this post from becoming a dead end right here. Mr. Larkins is known to Wikipedia by numerous professional names, including Willie Wong. He is a Miami-based pioneer of Miami bass, a subgenre of hip hop of which I actually was aware. The effects produced on a Roland TR-808 drum machine are the basis of this way of approaching music. Lo and behold, the label that released Tamarah’s album was RTR Records, with her 1990 release being #831.

While Mr. Larkins produced and engineered the album, its executive producer was Arny Leckie. A search for his name shows that he is “one of the top professionals real estate professionals in Miami-Dade County.” A bit of diversity in the business world is a good thing.

Someone is selling the LP of this release for $57 (US) because of its rarity. An eBay copy is going for $49. Someone else has the CD for $8. I could make at least eight times back on my original investment, if I were at all willing to part with a CD.

Since I don’t have a good enough grasp of obscure hip hop to decide if this music is any good, I’m depending on some feedback. You don’t have to be an expert to give an opinion. Let me know what you think.

Note that any crackles you hear are on the CD, not just on the compressed file.

For Saturday, we’ll look at another week of 1950s charts. See you then!

Tamarah, Male Tender Roni

Tamarah, This Love Will Never Die

Tamarah, Satisfaction

Tamarah, Back to Your Heart

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 8: A Woman with a Bad Case of the Blues

2009-02-21T16:31:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

Thanks to the bad timing of work and some physical wobbliness, this post, which is already 16 hours later than usual, will be confined to true highlights of the week. Sorry about that.

February 19, 1955: Johnny Ace scored his only Top 40 pop hit, “Pledging My Love,” beginning this week. It will wind up a mid-level performer on all three charts, and many artists in that situation would go on to reasonable careers. Johnny, born John Alexander, would not. Between Christmas Eve sets in Houston, he pointed a pistol at a couple of people, then at his own head, and shot himself. Varying accounts call it a three-person game of Russian Roulette or a simple suicide, and some venture to say his label owner had something to do with his death. Johnny died on Christmas Day. “Pledging My Love” topped the R&B chart for 10 weeks.

February 25, 1956: Louis Armstrong and Billy Vaughn and His Orchestra both debut their versions of the Threepenny Opera theme, and that puts us one shy of having five versions in the Top 100’s Top 40, which will happen next week. I’ll give you full recording details then.

February 23, 1957: Charlie Gracie debuts the first of two versions of “Butterfly.” In a rare feat, the song will top at least one chart in two different versions, the other coming next week. Competing versions of “Cinco Robles” debut this week, thanks to Russell Arms and Les Paul & Mary Ford.

February 24, 1958: A couple of iconic tunes show up: “Sweet Little Sixteen” by Chuck Berry, and “Good Golly Miss Molly” by Little Richard. Their chart histories will differ quite a bit: When “Sweet Little Sixteen climbs to #2 on both sales charts, the Jockeys will take it to #5. By contrast, “Good Golly Miss Molly will reach #10 on the Top 100, but it will not chart with the Jockeys at all.

One Jockey phenomenon this week is “The Little Blue Man” by Betty Johnson. It spends just this week on the Jockey chart, at #17, but later it will reach both sales charts. I don’t know why radio jumped on this one, but you can try to figure it out for yourself by listening to the track here.

February 23, 1959: All huge hits start somewhere, and Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” begins its chart run, which will culminate in 5 weeks at #1, as a #28 debut. Its quick climb, 99-53-28, probably indicated to everyone that the song was bound for the top.

For your listening pleasure, how about the radio no-show, “Good Golly Miss Molly,” and “The Little Blue Man,” a song about attempted murder of a stalker who is rejected primarily because of the color of his skin? The voice of the Blue Man was at one time thought to be Hugh Downs, but it turns out to be Fred Ebb, who helped concoct this ditty.

Wednesday, I’ll take a big risk and post an entire album by a female artist I can’t quite get into. I want to see if you find her more compelling than I do. See you then!

Little Richard, Good Golly Miss Molly

Betty Johnson, The Little Blue Man

220 Hits, and You Probably Don’t Know Him

2009-02-17T21:52:00.000-06:00

In my perusal of the pre-1955 music world, I will obviously focus on big names, since virtually all of the early artists have been banished to oblivion. There’s little point, for example, in profiling such a One-Hit Wonder as 1916’s Hipólito Lázaro, when Ted “Is Everybody Happy?” Lewis, as well as other big hitters, are names that barely register on our radar.

One dominant artist people know only by name is Paul Whiteman. His orchestra was enormously popular; in fact, he scored 220 chart hits, including 31 #1 songs. Chances are, though, that you know so little about him that you would lump him in with such orchestra luminaries as Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers. I did. I was wrong.

Paul Whiteman scored his first hit, “Whispering,” in 1920. It spent 11 weeks at #1. He charted eleven years before Goodman, fifteen before Miller, seven before Duke Ellington, and eight before the earliest Dorsey hits. Even so, his final hit, a remake of “Whispering,” charted in 1954, about as late as the other bandleaders, all of whom faded from the charts when people like Elvis (Presley) spoiled the party. Eventually, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band spoiled (or not) “Whispering” with their 1976 hit version. A number of Whiteman hits were reworked by Rock Era artists, including “My Blue Heaven” by Fats Domino and “Among My Souvenirs” by Connie Francis.

Paul Whiteman was born in 1890 in Denver, fourteen years after Colorado became a state. He was a symphonic violinist/violist until he decided to set up an orchestra when he was 29. Over the years, he teamed up with George Gershwin for the premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue,” with Gershwin on piano; he turned his orchestra jazzy early on with the addition of the likes of trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke; and, in 1927, he brought on board a young singer named Bing Crosby, who stuck around until he decided to try a solo career in 1930-31. Even Billie Holiday made an appearance on one hit in 1942.

To achieve the sound he desired, Whiteman essentially tripled the size of his band, as compared to other early 1920s bands. With somewhere around 30-35 musicians playing, he set the standard for the upcoming Swing Era. Despite orchestrating jazz sounds he liked rather than depending completely on improvisation, Whiteman was at times called the “Jazz King.”

Even in 1942, he was big enough that he earned the honor of releasing the debut Capitol Records 78, Capitol 101, which was “I Found a New Baby”/“The General Jumped at Dawn.”

Despite all that, and despite being a mainstay artist for Victor Records, it seems that fewer than half of his chart hits are available digitally, and there is no coherent box set that covers his career. Many of the Whiteman tracks one can buy online come from piecemeal compilations of the era or featured artists (Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden). Given Whiteman’s stature, influence and longevity, I find this omission odd, especially in contrast to such over-anthologized RCA Victor artists as my ultimate favorite bandleader, Dámaso Pérez Prado. I have seven CDs that contain Prado’s recording of “In a Spanish Town” and not a single disc that contains Whiteman’s 1927 8-week #1 version of the same song. There’s no Prado Complete Works box, but it’s inexcusable that Whiteman hasn’t gotten that treatment.

So, here are some of Paul Whiteman’s big recordings. If you know him, maybe you haven’t found some of these and will enjoy a listen. If you don’t know his work at all, I hope you’re glad you stopped by.

For Saturday, we’re on to Week Eight of the 1950s Chart Meltdown. See you then!

Paul Whiteman, Whispering

Paul Whiteman, Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin, piano

Paul Whiteman, Charleston

Paul Whiteman, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Paul Whiteman with Billie Holiday, Trav’lin’ Light

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 7, and Fools in Love

2009-02-14T00:30:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

For Valentine’s Day, it’s appropriate that Frankie Lymon’s first hit, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” would debut around that holiday. A couple of One-Hit Wonders round out a fairly routine week across the charts.

February 12, 1955: It’s a quiet week, but the “Sincerely” era begins on the Best Sellers chart, where the McGuire Sisters reach #1 to start a six-week run there. They replace the Fontane Sisters, who are now atop the Juke Box chart with “Hearts of Stone.” “Sincerely” is also the darling of the Disc Jockeys, and the McGuires will owe their eventual 10-week #1 total for this song to radio alone.

The few debuts this week include a One-Hit Wonder, Lenny Dee, with his instrumental “Plantation Boogie.” Two “Earth Angel” versions (Crew-Cuts and Penguins) finally climb onto the Juke Box chart, and a third, by Gloria Mann, debuts on the Best Sellers.

February 18, 1956: Juke Box operators and patrons still love Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This,” at #1 for the fourth week on that chart. There is fragmentation at the other top spots: Kay Starr reaches the Best Seller #1 slot with “Rock and Roll Waltz.” The Platters enjoy their first week at #1 on both the Top 100 and the Disc Jockey charts.

Speaking of Dean Martin, if you want the most up-to-date word on the man, you should scoot on over to this blog: ilovedinomartin, run by Dino Martin Peters. Apart from keeping track of new releases and events, the blog simply provides amazing entertainment.

There is a smash debut this week, “Poor People of Paris” by Les Baxter, His Chorus and Orchestra. It’s an instrumental with some la-la vocalization, and its title is incorrect. The song is French in origin, and when it was described by transatlantic phone, the man on the American side heard the title as “Les Pauvres Gens” (Poor People), when it was actually “Pauvre Jean” (Poor John). Whatever the title, Baxter’s hit debuts in the Top Ten on the Best Sellers chart, and at #25 on the Top 100. The Disc Jockeys drive it into the Top Ten as well, but it’s still a week away from a low-level debut on the Juke Box chart.

An iconic debut: “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, which steps into the fray at #15 on the Best Sellers chart. There’s no radio or juke box action, so it’s not a Top 40 hit on the Top 100 yet.

February 16, 1957: While Elvis Presley collects a second week at #1 on the Best Sellers with “Too Much,” he doesn’t do that well elsewhere. Tab Hunter’s version of “Young Love” tops the Top 100 and the Disc Jockey charts, and on the latter, Hunter replaces Sonny James’s original “Young Love.” On the Juke Box chart, Guy Mitchell hangs on to log a tenth week at #1 with “Singing the Blues.”

While last week brought “Marianne” to radio in both the Terry Gilkyson and the Hilltoppers versions, this is the first week as Best Sellers for both recordings. There, Gilkyson outpaces the Hilltoppers by 14 spots, but on the Top 100, the Hilltoppers win by four places.

On the Best Sellers chart, Guy Mitchell debuts with “Knee Deep in the Blues,” and it is listed there with its flip, “Take Me Back Baby.” However, because the flip charted independently and reached only #47, it doesn’t appear at all in the Top 40 book.

In the tradition of cowboy songs, Fess Parker and Bill Hayes, who competed previously with versions of “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” now lock horns over “Wringle Wrangle.” Hayes won round one, but Parker will take this battle.

Jazzy female singer Chris Connor scores her only Top 40 hit, reaching that level for the first time on the Top 100 with “I Miss You So.” While she will spend just three weeks at #40 or higher, the song will linger on the Top 100 for a total of 28 weeks.

Betty Johnson, who charted in December with “I Dreamed” and has been in the Top Ten on the Jockey chart for a little while, just now debuts on the Juke Box chart. A year and a week from now, she will give us one of the strangest Top 40 hits ever. I’ll bring you that one when the time is right.

February 17, 1958: “Don’t” by Elvis Presley remains atop the Best Sellers chart, but “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors logs its seventh week at #1 on the Top 100. The Jockeys have made “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters #1 on their chart, but they will peak no higher than #5 on the two sales charts, so perhaps the song was not as big a #1 as it would seem.

Two very radio-friendly songs make their Best Sellers debut this week—but they’re a couple of weeks away from their Jockey debut. “26 Miles (Santa Catalina)” by the Four Preps and “Witchcraft” by Frank Sinatra are uncharacteristic sales-only hits for these artists. That could have happened in part because the Jockey list is sluggish and almost static this week.

February 16, 1959: Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” logs a second week at #1. A notable debut is by a One-Hit Wonder: Thomas Wayne with the DeLons, who will take “Tragedy” into the Top Ten. Thomas Wayne Perkins is the brother of Luther Perkins, of Johnny Cash fame. Other than that, it’s an extremely quiet week on the Hot 100, as far as significant debuts go.

For your listening pleasure, give these One-Hit Wonders a spin. Lenny Dee, who recorded “Plantation Boogie” (Decca 29360), was born Leonard DeStoppelaire in Chicago. He played one of those big-sounding organs that are either used as solo instruments or not at all, because they overpower every other instrument within ten miles.

Thomas Wayne recorded “Tragedy” (Fernwood 109) with the DeLons. A Mississippi native, he died in an auto accident in 1971, at the age of 31. His brother, Luther, died at age 40 in 1968 when he fell asleep while smoking. Luther was Johnny Cash’s lead guitarist, the originator of the clicking guitar so prevalent on the Cash hits.

And for those who can’t get enough, or will get too much, of Valentine’s Day, here are the Teenagers featuring Frankie Lymon as well.

Wednesday, the biggest hit-making bandleader of all time. See you then!

Lenny Dee, Plantation Boogie

Thomas Wayne with the DeLons, Tragedy

The Teenagers featuring Frankie Lymon, Why Do Fools Fall in Love

My Fav Less-Than-Successful 1990s Band

2009-02-10T23:56:00.000-06:00

On alternate Wednesdays, I feature female vocalists I want to share with you. It’s time for such a post, and I am going to talk about a woman who sings, but I am going to cheat a bit, because this woman is a solo artist now, but in 1993, she was part of a band, and that music is what I most want to explore today.

In 1993-94, I had the good fortune to work at Tracks Records in Bloomington, Indiana. There, I was exposed to a number of artists I would not have met otherwise: Love Jones, Urge Overkill, Cowboy Junkies, and the like. I also got a far quicker introduction to Leonard Cohen’s classic The Future, though I would have come across it eventually.

Another act I would never have explored without Tracks was a melodic alternative band that was signed to Epic, which augured well in the early 1990s. I was introduced to the band via its second album, but I quickly looked up the first one and found it compelling as well.

The singer’s name was Joan Jones, a search-engine nightmare of the first order, but it’s not impossible to find information about her. What is essential to know is that she forged a songwriting partnership with the other vocalist of her band, and they made some spectacular music.

What struck me first about the songs recorded by this band, Sun 60, was their maturity. There was nothing raw about Sun 60, which put them in the same alternative category as Blondie. Inventive, proficient without being overly slick, and mature, the band rocked without losing its focus, and every note existed to further the goal of the song that contained it.

Joan Jones had a voice that reminded me of several other female vocalists of the time, including Lisa Germano, and stylistically I found her to be a cousin to Liz Phair. Joan’s voice could be tender, and she could wail. I didn’t count her among my top five favorite female singers, but her singing suited the songs she wrote.

She co-wrote all of the Sun 60 songs with David Russo (there’s the cheat—I mentioned a guy). They wrote three albums’ worth of music: Sun-60 (Epic 47849, 1991), Only (Epic 53447, 1993) and Headjoy (Epic 66794, 1995). While there are uneven spots on the albums, they are gems overall, and their legion of fans catapulted the band to the pinnacle of success.

Oh, wait. That last bit should have happened but didn’t. And I don’t get it at all.

I kept my ear to the ground in Bloomington. I played the Only CD often at the store, and people would come in, listen to it, and either buy it or tell me that they had bought it after seeing Sun 60 at a free show the band had put on. It seems that Epic believed in Sun 60 to a certain extent, and I gathered that the free shows were label-sponsored attempts to jump start a really promising act. Unlike the positive qualities of many decent acts, qualities that are difficult to pinpoint and articulate, those of Sun 60 are easy to list.

1. The presence of two distinctive lead vocalists provided listeners with great sonic balance. A dozen songs sung by Jones might have worn a bit, but Russo’s turns at the mic were crisp and compelling contrasts to Jones. On the songs they sang together, they clearly belonged together.

2. The guitar work was always tasteful, whether it was quiet acoustic arpeggios or loud, fast electric work. While bands obviously don’t keep guitar parts that stink, I mean that the layers of guitar parts were constructed carefully, not played happenstance and then accepted as suitable.

3. Though Russo was the band’s guitarist and piano player, and Jones sang and played trumpet, their recordings show off superb percussion. Despite having a revolving-door drummer situation, this aspect of the band’s sound carried through their three albums.

David Russo produced Only, which I consider to be the high point of the band’s output, and Headjoy. The debut album was produced by Greg Penny, but the production evolved rather than shifting dramatically when Russo took over.

A lot of evolution occurred as the band sought its niche. Beginning with the name, which began as Sun-60, moved to Sun 60 and finally to Sun60, the band tweaked itself in an ultimately futile quest for the success it deserved. The debut tended to be more acoustic-oriented, with the clever drumming coming from David Raven.

Only featured louder, but not usually rough, guitar, including a couple of raunchy leads by Dave Navarro. While David Raven played drums on a couple of songs, the ones I am featuring today, “Hold On” and “Tell Me Like You Know,” display the percussive handiwork of Jack Irons.

Headjoy was a reaction to the disappointment of having a really excellent album produce less-than-expected results. Russo opted for a heavier guitar sound, going grungy and leaving behind the crisp notes of the predecessors. On this album, Jones sang all of the vocals; I don’t know if they decided that the band should be fronted by a woman, or if the songs, all with lyrics by Jones, simply happened to require a female perspective in the singing.

The fact is that the third album showed tiny signs of a musical fraying, one that led to a creative split between Jones and Russo in 1996. Since then, Jones has performed solo, and she is on tour now with Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Russo has gone on to score films, including the Robin Williams movie Man of the Year, Pineapple Express, and the Dune TV miniseries.

And me, I just sit around listening to my Sun 60 CDs and wishing like crazy that these two, Jones and Russo, had found a larger audience in time to make it worth their while to put out another ten albums or so.

The first track listed below comes from the debut album, and the other two are from Only. David Russo sings the third track, one of my favorite recordings from the entire decade of the 1990s. Be sure to check out all three.

Joan Jones has a website, and you can find her tour dates there.

Sun 60, Middle of My Life

Sun 60, Hold On

Sun 60, Tell Me Like You Know

Apart from those songs, here’s a change of pace on YouTube, another song from Only, “Never Seen God.” Embedding is disabled by Sony, so here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVnM4JmBRw&feature=related

For Saturday, Week Seven of the 1950s chart breakdown. Next Wednesday, look for the biggest early bandleader to make his Great Vinyl Meltdown debut. See you Saturday!

1950s Chart Meltdown, Week 6, and a Couple of Guys

2009-02-06T23:00:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

February 5, 1955: Sister acts start a long run at #1 on the Best Sellers this week, as the Fontane Sisters, whose last name is actually Rosse, reach the top with “Hearts of Stone.” Joan Weber still rules the Juke Box and Disc Jockey charts. More cover competition emerges for some hits: the Crew-Cuts version of “Earth Angel” charts this week to challenge the Penguins, and the somewhat creepy “Make Yourself Comfortable,” a hit for the completely not creepy Sarah Vaughan, is met by a true One-Week Wonder, Peggy King. Peggy’s version scrapes into the bottom slot (#30) of the Best Sellers.

Note: the more recent chart books state that the King version reached #30 on both the Best Sellers and the Top 100, but the Top 100 won’t exist until November 2, 1955 (chart date November 12, 1955), and a careful perusal of Top 100 charts into early 1957 shows no re-emergence of this side.

Yet another version of “Make Yourself Comfortable” will appear for a One Week Wonder, and when that happens, I’ll bring you audio of all three hits in every speck of their splendor.

A sort of backwards cover debuts this week on the Best Sellers. Boogie pianist Johnny Maddox teams with the Rhythmasters on an instrumental medley called “The Crazy Otto,” inspired by a German pianist by that name. Crazy Otto himself will chart soon with the two-sided single “Glad Rag Doll”/“Smiles”; I don’t know if the Maddox release inspired an importation of Crazy Otto’s music, or if it was already on the way.

The Jockeys are still spinning four versions of “Melody of Love” in their Top 20, and the least popular version continues to be the Frank Sinatra recording, an unusual turn of events. Not much else is going on with the short charts.

February 11, 1956: Dean Martin’s monster “Memories Are Made of This” is still the unanimous #1. Since Gale Storm had the foresight to record this song as the flip to “Teen-Age Prayer,” her take on “Memories” has been listed as a Best Seller flip for most of the single’s chart run. This week, it is re-added after dropping off for a week.

Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti” comes across in the books as a respectable Best Sellers hit at #15. In fact, it is part of a two-sided hit with “I’ll Be Home,” and on the Best Sellers, “Tutti Frutti” is listed as the A-side for just this debut week; the rest of the time, “I’ll Be Home” is the bigger record. The Top 100 confirms it; after entering the chart a week late, “I’ll Be Home” will need just two weeks to pass “Tutti Frutti.”

Error alert: “I’ll Be Home” is listed as having entered the Top 40 on February 4, 1956. It did enter the Top 100 at #72 that week, but its Top 40 debuts occur this week on the Top 100 and the Disc Jockey charts, and later on the other two charts.

On the Tasteless Music front, the terrible “Go On with the Wedding” resurfaces at the hands of Kitty Kallen and Georgie Shaw. This, after the Patti Page version has climbed to #11 on the Top 100 this week. Fortunately, Kitty and Georgie will get just this week to bask in their glory, tying for the bottom spot at #39.

February 9, 1957: In the collapse of the long Guy Mitchell stranglehold on the top spot, we find ourselves with four #1s this week: Elvis Presley on the Best Sellers with “Too Much”; Pat Boone’s “Don’t Forbid Me” on the Top 100; Sonny James on the DJ chart with “Young Love,” and Guy Mitchell in his ninth week atop the Juke Box chart with “Singing the Blues.”

For some reason, with Tab Hunter’s “Young Love” dropping from 3 to 4 on the Best Sellers, its flip, “Red Sails in the Sunset,” is co-listed for one week. This listing is ignored in the Top 40 books because the song reaches #57 on the Top 100 eventually. In a similar situation, “Playing for Keeps” by Elvis (Presley) reaches the Top 40 of the Top 100 chart this week, negating for the Top 40 book the song’s emergence as a Best Seller flip on February 2, 1957.

This is the week that “Marianne” hits radio, as both the Terry Gilkyson and the Hilltoppers versions make the Disc Jockey chart. A year ago, Gilkyson was riding high as a songwriter, with “Memories Are Made of This.” Now, he earns his only Top 40 single, though his Easy Riders will appear on a number of other hit singles.

February 10, 1958: “Don’t" by Elvis Presley is the new Best Sellers chart-topper, but “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors is still #1 everywhere else. A couple of big instrumentals join the Best Sellers, “The Swingin’ Shepherd Blues” by One-Hit Wonder Moe Koffman, and the iconic whistling of “March from the River Kwai and Col. Bogey” by the ubiquitous Mitch Miller and his cast of dozens.

Sixteen months after his first Top 40 hit, Johnny Cash proves he can still make the charts when “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” debuts this week. We all know “I Walk the Line” would not be his only pop hit, but after he reached just #99 and #88 in 1957, this success has to come as a relief to Johnny, and to Sun Records.

In one of the oddest chart movements ever, Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” is #3 on the DJ chart this week—and it will not appear among the 25 DJ songs next week. On February 24, 1958, it will reappear at #21, showing that it had not been on the chart the previous week, so it wasn’t a clerical error. I have no idea how the DJs could have decided not to play the song for a week when it had moved from #5 to #3 the previous week.

One song by a One-Hit Wonder makes its debut on the Disc Jockey chart this week, and it will never reach the sales charts Top 40. The artist is Nick Todd, and his hit is a cover of “At the Hop.” “Todd” is just his label, Dot, spelled backwards; his real name, according to the Top 40 books, is Nicholas Boone. Wikipedia lists his name as Cecil Altman Boone. Either way, he’s another Boone on Dot, which makes him Pat’s younger brother. And, you know how Pat took songs by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the El Dorados and others and made the songs sound whiter? Well, Nick makes the Danny and the Juniors classic sound even whiter than the original. Amazing.

February 9, 1959: One classic replaces another at #1: Lloyd Price jumps to the top spot with “Stagger Lee,” while “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by the Platters slips to #4.

This is probably the first reporting week that could show a chart effect from the previous week’s plane crash that killed Ritchie Valens, but his death did not push “Donna” to #1. He stays steady at #3, and “La Bamba” drops 8 spots to #30.

A classic in the making debuts in the form of “Charlie Brown” by the Coasters. The other debut that will show some longevity is Brook Benton’s sophisticated reading of “It’s Just a Matter of Time.” Apart from “Rainy Night in Georgia,” Brook probably never sounded better.

For your listening pleasure, here are two very different singing styles. 1957 brought us “Marianne” by Terry Gilkyson. Terry (1916-1999) was a Pennsylvania boy who went out West to become a folk singer. He wrote “The Cry of the Wild Goose” for Frankie Laine, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for writing ‘Bare Necessities” for Disney’s The Jungle Book. His son, Tony, was a guitarist for Lone Justice and X, and one of his daughters, Eliza, will be featured on this blog soon.

Brook Benton (1931-1988) was born Benjamin Franklin Peay in South Carolina. He wrote “A Lover’s Question” for Clyde McPhatter, and his reputation as a songwriter (for the likes of Nat “King” Cole) got him a recording contract with Mercury Records. Nat was going to record Brook’s composition “It’s Just a Matter of Time,” but Clyde Otis of Mercury (who himself co-wrote “The Stroll”) asked Nat to hold off. Brook took the song, his Mercury debut, to #3.

Here’s Brook Benton performing this classic on television. The vocals are not lip-synched from the 45 version, at least.

Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders, Marianne (Columbia 40817)

Brook Benton, It’s Just a Matter of Time (Mercury 71394)

Comedy So Funny, It’s Not Funny

2009-02-04T12:37:00.000-06:00

In the past week, I have been reminded how fragile three things are: plans, health, and comedy. You can probably see how the first two notions are related, but comedy? Give me a moment.

In August, 2007, I vowed I would be present at whatever events marked the 50th anniversary of the last stage performances by the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly (to shake up the usual name order a bit). Then, a couple of months ago, I was asked with some fervor to please be a chaperone on a school trip to Spain, no cost. The tradeoff? No Surf Ballroom on February 2.

I would have opted for the Surf anyway, as an ephemeral opportunity, but not going to Spain would have been a severe dereliction of duty at work. So, forget Clear Lake.

Then, a couple of days before I was to leave for Spain, an important person in my world was hospitalized, and I had to skip the trip. Once I had gotten past the disappointment of not going to Iowa, Spain had begun to seem alluring, and now I was not able to go. That disappointment was smaller than missing Iowa.

But now, although it was too late to get tickets to the February 2 concert at the Surf Ballroom, I could drive down to see the exhibits and listen to the panels, including one made up of people who attended the February 2, 1959 Winter Dance Party gig. Sometimes things work out as they were meant to.

Except, then, they don’t. A few hours after I was supposed to leave for Spain, and after the health crisis that had kept me home had passed, a disconcerting two-day loss of appetite turned into a gastrointestinal disaster of my own. Having been down with severe food poisoning a few times, I recognized the symptoms. It’s Wednesday morning here (and this post is going up hours later than usual), and I am actually sicker than I was Monday.

Of course, I did not go to Clear Lake, Iowa for any of the events. You could say, “Thank goodness you didn’t get on that plane, or you would be sick in Spain.” And I could counter with “I might not have eaten whatever sickened me if I had not stayed behind.”

That’s how plans are fragile. No Spain, no Iowa. Sometimes when I was distressed, I used to go out and buy myself a CD. Occasionally, I would have a “two-CD day,” which meant it was a real bummer. There was a memorable seven-CD day once. This time, I pulled out my Top 40 book, went online, and nabbed 400 One-Hit Wonders I didn’t yet own. Take that, Fates! This is officially a 21-CD set of circumstances.

How is health fragile? I have been laid low by a one-celled organism. I probably kill millions of them every time I walk around. But if you let this one into your gut, you pay. Since I haven’t yet turned the corner, I’m not happy about the situation.

What does any of this have to do with the fragility of comedy? Well, I’ll tell you: I am not in a funny situation now. In ten years, when we mark the 60th anniversary of the loss of those three young artists, I may indulge in a bit of dark humor about where I was sitting when Bobby Vee took the stage in Clear Lake.

What is not funny in 2009 may be mildly so in 2019. And, by contrast, what was uproariously funny in 1909 is not necessarily funny in 2009.

One way to make my point would be for you to seek a collection of New Yorker cartoons from the 1930s. The cartoons that appear in that magazine are made into cartoon-a-day calendars, and recent ones show up taped to the cubicle walls of many a frustrated office employee throughout the United States. The humor is sardonic, clever, dry. It always has been. It also tends to be topical. And while some comedic subjects are funny seventy years on, most political and social humor that is time-sensitive is not.

When we talk about vaudeville, we get the impression that there is a treasure trove of humor that we have missed, full of wonderful gags and one-liners that had the audience roaring with laughter. Well, these jokes did have the audiences roaring. But there is another factor to take into account: culture.

I have often heard that you can’t say you’ve assimilated a new culture (if you move to another nation or, in some cases, another state) until you begin to laugh at its jokes. Humor is an in-crowd phenomenon; if I laugh at Minnesotans’ Ole and Lena jokes, it is partly still as an outsider. I’m not laughing at my cultural roots, but someone else’s. The ones that I find amusing don’t have to be about two Swedes. The ones that depend on being Swedish to get them still escape me sometimes.

Listening to vaudeville recordings from a century ago shows that the culture that spawned vaudeville is very distinct from our current culture. One can extrapolate from there and see that, a century from now, very little of what we see on Saturday Night Live will seem funny to those people. We may think now that we are done with the Coneheads because we got tired of them, and that would be true if the people of 2109 found them delightful the first few times they saw them. But I would bet that people will stare blankly at a screen when those routines are run a century from now.

Vaudeville sketches that were recorded for sale on cylinders made up a huge part of the recording industry’s early chart history. People bought them, then sat around and listened to routines over and over. Imagine buying a CD that includes “Who’s on First?” by Abbott and Costello and sitting around the speaker with your family, listening to it every day for a few weeks, and laughing every time.

Recording limitations required that the sketches be recorded in the studio, which meant that there was no audience to provide a laugh track. All laughter would be supplied by the purchaser of the cylinder. This fact makes it easier for us to decide if a recorded joke is funny or not, because laughter is infectious, and its absence makes the joke responsible for any reaction it evokes.

A number of comedic artists seem to have made a success of these recordings. Some of the most successful include Len Spencer, whose most successful version of “Arkansaw Traveler” was the best-selling record released before 1905. Another extremely big spoken-word comic was Russell Hunting, who scored five #1 hits that played off his recurring character, Michael Casey, all between 1891 and 1894. Another artist, John Kaiser, used the Michael Casey character later, with less success.

A lot of these recordings were ethnic in nature. The prime targets of such dialogues were the Irish and African Americans, though some attention was paid to Jewish stereotypes as well. The relative assimilation of the Irish into mainstream culture makes 1900s jokes about them instantly less amusing, and the jokes about the other groups are simply not considered polite at this point in our cultural development.

Something else to note is that these artists speak differently from us (from current United States native speakers of English, I mean). I do not believe there are still pockets of the country where people speak as Hunting, Spencer and Kaiser do. Granted, there is some attempt to sound oratorical here, or to sound Irish, but it seems to me that there is a real shift in the way English is spoken when 1900s English is compared to ours.

Some of these recordings may have been meant to be educational as well as amusing. “Michael Casey at the Telephone,” for example, seems to serve as a procedural for using this invention, which would still be new to some Americans and especially to recent immigrants.

Well, I was going to launch into detailed discussions of the artists, but I’m beginning to get wobbly. So I’ll tell you that Len Spencer (1867-1947) was the first huge recording star, beginning with such eventual classics as “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom Der E” and “The Old Folks at Home.” His parents were noted citizens: his mother a leading suffragist, his father the inventor of an influential penmanship style. Russell Hunting (1865-1943) was first a dramatic actor, then a comedic recording artist. Hunting was perhaps the first recording artist to fall afoul of decency laws, and he spent time in jail for his jokes. He was a pioneer in using his fame as a recording artist to hawk products. He also recorded an 1893 recitation of the Ernest Thayer poem “Casey at the Bat.” After Hunting went off to be a record-label executive in England, John Kaiser was tapped by Edison Records to take over the Michael Casey persona. He was not as successful as Hunting, and the question arises: Was Hunting just better at it, or had humor just started to move on?

The routines that follow are not completely devoid of amusement, and they display a certain charm. Let me know if you happen to find yourself ROTFL, okay?

Saturday, it’s Week Six of the 1950s Billboard charts, and next Wednesday (I have my weeks straight this time), it’s a female singer-songwriter from the 1990s whose band should have been big but wasn’t. See you Saturday!

Len Spencer, Arkansaw Traveler

Russell Hunting, Michael Casey at the Telephone

John Kaiser, Casey Courting His Girl

Blossoms in February

2009-01-31T00:57:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

This post will look a bit thin, because I’m writing it under unusual circumstances. All will be back to normal in a week.

January 29, 1955: It’s all about cover versions on this week’s Best Sellers chart. LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee” faces a challenge from Georgia Gibbs’s new single, “Tweedle Dee.” I guess dropping that final “e” from Tweedlee makes it all better. You can’t say it was a mistake for the McGuire Sisters to focus on “Sincerely” as the A-side of their current single, but now that the DeJohn Sisters are in the Best Sellers Top Ten with “(My Baby Don’t Love Me) No More,” it makes sense for the flip side of “Sincerely,” namely “No More,” to be pushed as well. The gamble will pay off, as “Sincerely” is bound for the top anyway. “No More” won’t do as well as its competition, but it’s still a decent chart hit. And the Crew-Cuts, who have made a career of covering R&B hits for white audiences, will have the tables turned, because they are first to the chart with “Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So),” but next week, another really white artist, Perry Como, will shove their version aside. Their response will be to cover the Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Speaking of the Penguins’ version of “Earth Angel,” its Top Ten Best Sellers performance has finally helped it onto the Disc Jockey chart—for one pitiful week. By contrast, the Jockeys will take the Crew-Cuts’ version to #3 quickly, though the Penguins outsell their version.

Error to note: The Top 40 book says that “Earth Angel” by the Crew-Cuts entered the charts on 1/29/1955, but it debuted on 2/5/1955. The Hot 100 book confirms that fact.

February 4, 1956: Dean Martin continues to rule the four charts with “Memories Are Made of This.” The Top 100 shows some liveliness in its debuts: Both “Tutti Fruttis,” the Little Richard and the Pat Boone versions, chart this week.

Two really classy singles by “One-Hit Wonders” come aboard as well: “Lullaby of Birdland,” sung in French by New York native Blossom Dearie as part of the Blue Stars, and “April in Paris,” an instrumental by a guy who sounds pretty smooth for a Rock-Era One-Hit Wonder. His name? Count Basie. As you may know, William “Count” Basie charted 26 times from 1937 to 1948, and then twice more in 1954, just before the Rock Era began. “April in Paris” fits solidly into the Rock Era timewise, but the recording makes no concessions to Elvis or anyone else. Basie is Basie.

February 2, 1957: Guy Mitchell refused to yield the top spot on any chart. “Singing the Blues” logs its 9th week atop three charts, and its 8th atop the Juke Box chart. Coming on strong on the Best Sellers chart is “Too Much” by Elvis Presley. Note of interpretation: The flip of “Too Much,” “Playing for Keeps,” is listed in the Top 40 book as a 2/9/1957 chart entry, but that takes into account only the Top 100 chart. It is listed as a flip on the Best Sellers already chart this week.

Among the numerous Top 100 debuts this week is “Ain’t Got No Home” by Clarence Henry, nicknamed “Frog Man.” The song has already come and gone on the Best Sellers, but it will last slightly longer here, despite its late start. Clarence earned the nickname “Frog Man” because he claims on this record to be able to sing like a frog (which he does, for the third verse). However, he also claims that he can sing like a girl (which he does, for the second verse). So, I ask why no one nicknamed him “Girlie Man.” Or maybe “Girlie-Frog Man.” I wonder if he feels slighted to have just his frog-singing talents noted.

February 3, 1958: “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors maintains its stranglehold at #1. One notable debut, destined to be used in numerous commercials, is “Short Shorts” by the Royal Teens. Boasting one of the thickest East Coast accents you will find in a Top 40 hit, this bunch of Jersey boys will eventually cough up one member, Bob Gaudio, to the benefit of the 4 Seasons. An enduring Perry Como double-sided hit debuts on the Best Sellers: “Catch a Falling Star” and “Magic Moments.”

An unusual Disc Jockey debut is “A Very Special Love” by Johnny Nash, which sneaks onto the Jockey chart for one week but never makes the Top 40 on either sales chart.

February 2, 1959: The Platters hold steady at #1 with “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Ritchie Valens maintains his #3 grip with “Donna,” while “La Bamba” jumps 11 spots on the Hot 100 to #22.

A huge debut is “Tall Paul” by Annette, her first hit, and a step toward making her less of a Mouseketeer and more of a teen idol at age 16. What’s next? Ask Elvis: Movies! Fabian gets his recording career off the ground this week as well, with “I’m a Man.” At this point, he hadn’t really learned to sing, but if you live in Philadelphia and look like Dick Clark’s vision of a teen idol, you’re set.

It’s worth noting that this is the final Top 40 week for the debut season of “The Little Drummer Boy” by the Harry Simeone Chorale. Whew! I just figured out that Harry is responsible for another perennial, “It’s a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame.”

Another newcomer is a sentimental favorite of mine, “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” by Johnny Cash. The single was taken from the LP The Fabulous Johnny Cash, which my dad owned, and I inherited (or perhaps stole) when I started being the family DJ. The album died in the 1972 Great Vinyl Meltdown, but I was very happy to learn that Columbia reissued the album on CD, complete with cover art and liner notes. I bought the CD immediately, of course.

For your listening pleasure, here are the two 1956 One-Hit Wonders. Blossom Dearie formed the Blue Stars in Paris, which accounts for the decision to sing “Lullaby of Birdland” in French.

Here’s a link to a video of Blossom Dearie, playing piano and singing, in the mid-1980s. Sorry, I can’t embed the video.

And how could we have a Count Basie debut and not include it?

Blue Stars, Lullaby of Birdland

Count Basie, April in Paris

Timi, a Chicago Lassie

2009-01-27T23:01:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, in a class I teach, I was checking homework, and a young lady whose surname starts with Z (how niftily did I avoid the “zed” vs. “zee” issue there, eh?) asked if I would please start at the end of the alphabet once in awhile. I thought about it for a microsecond, and I called her up after I checked the homework of a guy whose name starts with A.

If I had done that earlier in life and more often, I would have discovered one of my favorite songs long before 2006. Why didn’t I find it before then? It’s singer’s last name starts with Y.

When I dig through my Top 40 Hits book for songs I don’t know, I rarely end up in the Ys. It’s a small section, and it’s really easy to overlook. A huge percentage of Y artists are One-Hit Wonders, which should tell you something about naming a band with a Y word. Only a couple of compelling artists are there: “Weird Al” Yankovic, the Yardbirds, and Yes.

Oh, that Neil Young guy, too. But there are 12 One-Hit Wonders out of 22 Y acts. Z is worse, 8 of 11, but let’s not nitpick. I’m tired.

So, I take no blame for missing one Y artist for so long. Whenever I saw the artist on compilations, it was always the same song, one I had never heard. I didn’t know if the artist was male or female, and I assumed it was another One-Hit Wonder. Finally, one of the compilations I bought contained this compilation cliché, and I listened to it.

It was a 1961 remake of a 1955 Roy Hamilton recording, and I was neutral as to its value to me. I liked the deep voice, which I figured to be a woman’s voice, though I also thought at one time that Eddie Holman might be a woman with a man’s name. This person had what could have been an odd spelling of a man’s name, so I was pretty confused.

This singer was Timi Yuro, and the song everyone anthologized was “Hurt,” a #4 song in late summer, 1961. Her vocal performance showed considerable skill and nuance, but the song was a basic 1955 song, and it was the Sixties when she recorded it.

The breakthrough for me came when I started iTunesing from the end of the alphabet. One of my first acquisitions was another Timi Yuro song, “What’s a Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You)" (Liberty 55469). This one was an ear-opener for me.

When whiteray graciously offered me the chance to share my 13 favorite Hot 100 hits, I nearly included this one. The arrangement sounds like a precursor to the 1964 Bert Berns-produced Drifters hits, which doesn’t mean the arrangement was ahead of its time. It simply recalls some other tunes I enjoy. It could also sound like a precursor to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, because he produced it. All of the Spector hallmarks are there, in a spectacular arrangement.

What hooked me was the voice. In both “Hurt” and her third hit, “Make the World Go Away” (which she recorded before Eddy Arnold), Timi does a fine job with slow numbers. Nevertheless, it’s in this uptempo number, one that allows her gruff voice to sound betrayed and gleeful at payback, that Timi’s voice finds its niche.

And she really cut loose on this one. It bugs me that the recording session came off as it did. In the other two hits, her voice is crystal-clear recording-wise, which allows us to hear the grit in her pipes. But on my favorite of her recordings, someone, maybe Spector, didn’t hear the needles in the meters when they slapped hard right while she belted the vocals. That would be why they also have visual cues that a microphone is about to explode. But evidently, no one looked at the meters.

And so, it sounds as if they put waxed paper between Timi and the microphone, especially in the bridge. That’s unfortunate, but she makes her musical point very well. Play it loud.

Born in Chicago in 1940, her real name is a bit up for grabs. Whitburn, 7th ed. says her name was Rosemarie Timothy Yuro. Wikipedia calls her Rosemary Timothy Yuro. Whitburn 8th says she was born Rosemarie Timotea Aurro, which sounds most likely for being so exotic. She was of Italian lineage, so I vote for option three. It’s an excellent name. But wait! An official website that stems from the Official Timi Yuro Association, which she co-founded in 1981, agrees with Wikipedia. Sigh.

I’m not the only music fan to appreciate her voice. Apart from me, and, most likely, you, there’s Elvis (Presley) and Willie Nelson, who facilitated her final album in 1982. At age 42, she was, of course, still in fine voice. Around the time of that recording, she was diagnosed with throat cancer, and she eventually had her larynx removed. She lived as a cancer survivor until March 30, 2004.

I’ll post the song, but if you simply want to hear it, and see a still of this lovely young woman, you can follow this link to a YouTube post. Rather than embed it here, I’m linking to it, because my link gives you the stereo track.

"What's a Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You)" (YouTube)

Timi Yuro, What's a Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You) (zShare)

Saturday, another 1950s chart summary, for Week Five. See you then!

Lovely Melodies and Fruity Tunes

2009-01-23T22:01:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

January 22, 1955: Joan Weber’s “Let Me Go Lover” finally tops the sales chart, after being a television, radio and coin-op sensation since November. She still hasn’t consolidated her hold on the top spot, as she drops from #1 to #2 on the radio chart, where “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes regains the top spot.

The only sales debut is the third chart version of “Melody of Love,” this time a vocal version by the Four Aces. Billy Vaughn is at #7, and David Carroll at #21, a spot above the Four Aces. Three other songs re-enter the sales chart, but they are all retreads that had fallen a few notches out of the Top 30.

A Top Ten sales hit, “Sincerely” by the McGuire Sisters, finally cracks the coin-op Top 20. Nothing else moves there, but radio gets “Melody of Love” religion, adding three versions to join Billy Vaughn: David Carroll, the Four Aces, and Frank Sinatra with Ray Anthony and His Orchestra. The Sinatra/Anthony version will chart only on radio. This week, at least, “Melody of Love” makes up 20% of radio’s Top 20.

January 28, 1956: Dean Martin finally has a unanimous #1 with “Memories Are Made of This,” one of his most enduring hits. Popping onto the sales charts this week are several songs that will create trends. A second version of “Teen-Age Prayer,” this time a Gloria Mann recording that hopes to steal some sales from Gale Storm, debuts this week. The iconic Little Richard recording of “Tutti Frutti” debuts on the short sales chart, to be joined soon by a tepid Pat Boone version.

And, very quietly, the “Unforgettable” Sound of the Dick Hyman Trio (thus was he billed) climbs onto both the short and the long sales charts with “Moritat (A Theme from the ‘Three Penny Opera’).” This song will find itself on the long chart five times on March 3, under four different titles. Two other artists will resurrect the song in 1959-60. More details will follow.

January 26, 1957: It’s all Guy Mitchell, all the time, as “Singing the Blues” logs its 8th week atop three charts, and its 7th atop the coin-op chart. The Sonny James original of “Young Love” threatens at #2 on the short sales chart, but its #1 status will owe itself eventually to radio. Tab Hunter’s version is hot on its heels, and a third contender, by the Crew-Cuts, debuts on the long sales chart but won’t go far.

The sampling methodology for the coin-op chart means that just this week, the James/Hunter “Young Love” versions debut there. Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday,” which is headed for Top Ten sales, just now makes the coin-op and radio charts.

January 27, 1958: Though “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors is in its 4th week at #1, the Top Ten is shaking itself up, as the #6 through #10 songs are rising stars, cracking the Top Ten for the first time. The songs are “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes, “Sail Along Silvery Moon” (with “Raunchy” still showing strong B-side support) by Billy Vaughn and His Orchestra, “The Stroll” by the Diamonds, “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters, and “La Dee Dah” by Billy & Lillie. “Get a Job” and “Sugartime” will reach #1 on other charts, but none of the five will top the short sales chart.

A bit of a chart misnomer has occurred with the flip of Ricky Nelson’s “Be-Bop Baby.” That B-side, “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?” did make the long sales chart on its own, so its flip numbers were erased. Had the song stalled at #41 or lower, it would not appear in the Top 40 book at all. But the song spent 17 weeks on the short sales chart, listed as a flip, apart from its three Top 40 weeks on the long sales chart. I find that run worthy of note.

Another chart quirk is the debut of “Don’t” by Elvis Presley on both sales charts, whereas it’s a week away from hitting the radio chart. I don’t know if the song’s subject matter led to radio resistance, or if the jockeys thought it was too quiet, but they will catch on when sales go through the roof.

January 26, 1959: The Platters hold steady at #1 with “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Even with “La Bamba” making some chart headway, “Donna” by Ritchie Valens climbs from #4 to #3. Mitch Miller has jumped on the “Children’s Marching Song” bandwagon to compete with Cyril Stapleton, doubling the pain on the Top 40.

A couple of eventually hard-to-find songs debut, both by One-Hit-Wonders: Jesse Lee Turner charts with “The Little Space Girl,” his only Top 40 hit, and Philadelphia’s Quaker City Boys prove to be a True One-Week Wonder, as “Teasin’” spends a week at #39, then sinks immediately.

For your listening pleasure, here are the two 1959 One-Hit Wonders. The Quaker City Boys, a string band in the finest Philadelphia tradition, was led by Tommy Reilly. The song appeared on Swan 4023. Jesse Lee Turner was a Texan, a purveyor of rockabilly who took his lone hit to #20 on Carlton 496.

For Wednesday, I’ll explore spoken-word comedy from the early days of music, after a one-week detour. See you then!

Quaker City Boys, Teasin’

Jesse Lee Turner, The Little Space Girl

Move Over, Patti, Connie, Madonna & Britney!

2009-01-21T00:04:00.000-06:00

First, my only political comment, ever: I have never seen the nation come together this way. I am grateful that it is happening.

Oh, and I must ask: Did anyone besides me and Veto Corleone notice that Keith Olbermann said that, from a distance, “Obama will look like a raisin?” How do some people get away with unfortunate comments more easily than others? In case you’re wondering, I don’t know who Veto Corleone is; I just searched for Obama and raisin. But good for Veto; he kept me from suspecting that I had hallucinated.

Now, the post:

It should be obvious that the concept of phenomenally successful female vocalists did not originate with Madonna and Britney Spears. If you assume it did, Patti Page and Connie Francis might want to have a word with you. And if you believe Patti was the first woman to dominate the record stores, consider Ella Fitzgerald’s tenure with Chick Webb’s orchestra.

Surely, if we go back that far, logic would indicate to you that, even in the very early days of recorded music, there had to be some female vocalist who sold tons of cylinders to adoring listeners.

That woman was Ada Jones.

Ada’s credentials are impressive. On her own or in duets with occasional partners, she scored 64 hits between 1905 and 1919. With one frequent duet partner, the likewise popular Billy Murray, she logged another 44 hits between 1907 and 1922. Between 1905 and 1910, she reached the charts 20 times with Len Spencer. Her #1 hits total 13.

There’s not a lot of biographic information available about Ada, but I can tell you a few things. English by birth (June 1, 1973, Lancashire), she moved to the United States when she was five or six. Living in Philadelphia, she did stage work until she discovered the recording medium. Beginning in 1904, she recorded cylinders for Edison Records, and she scored her first hit in May of 1905.

Soon thereafter, a huge star, Billy Murray, met Ada. At the time, Billy was scheduled to record the female parts of some vaudeville comedy routines with Len Spencer. Just as in Shakespeare’s time, men did that sort of thing. But Ada came in very handy, and she recorded a string of hits with Len in Billy’s stead.

Ada then became Billy’s vocal partner, and they recorded successfully until shortly before Ada’s death in 1922, at age 49.

Ada was 31 when she started recording, and while she could not have started recording before her 17th birthday or so, one has to wonder how many more hits than her 128 she would have amassed if she had been guided into recording from the beginning.

Ada, like many singers of her time, was adept at dialect. While she favored an Irish tinge to her singing, one example below shows her and Len Spencer in a Jewish vaudeville sketch. Such recordings show how fragile many forms of comedy are, and how short-lived they are, or should be.

I have learned that an exceptional source for acoustic-era music is the Internet Archive. Check it out. The third recording below is from their collection. Since it was available for download, I believe I can repost it.

Saturday, I’ll bring you another week of the 1950s charts, and next Wednesday, the biggest male performer of the pre-1920 era. See you Saturday!

Ada Jones & Len Spencer, The Original Cohens (1906)

Ada Jones & Len Spencer, Bashful Henry and His Lovin’ Lucy (1906)

Ada Jones, Waitin’ at the Church (My Wife Won’t Let Me) (1906)

The Great Chart Meltdown: Week 3

2009-01-16T21:52:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

Bananas abound, and La Bamba comes aboard, in this third week of the 1950s chart years.

January 15, 1955: A quiet week on the charts, “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes holds the #1 spot for the 7th week on the sales chart. On the coin-op and radio charts, it has been overtaken by Joan Weber’s “Let Me Go Lover.” The sales debuts are, on the surface, of mild interest: The Four Coins log a One-Week Wonder with “Love You Madly”; the Charms debut with a version of “Ling, Ting, Tong” to compete with the Five Keys’ version that debuted on December 25, 1954. The song, which deals with a rockin’ Chinaman, shows that racial stereotyping isn’t limited to Mexicans.

LaVern Baker, billed with the Gliders on her first Top 40 single, “Tweedlee Dee,” will soon learn the frustration of having a white performer cover her song, with the arrangement of the cover matching hers almost note for note. The anger will lead to a lawsuit, and the courts will decide that identical covers are legal. The ramifications for LaVern Baker and other artists is huge, whereas the songwriters and publishers may even benefit from having a song on both the R&B and the Pop charts.

January 21, 1956: Dean Martin rules on three of the four charts with “Memories Are Made of This,” while “Sixteen Tons” by “Tennessee” Ernie Ford is in its 8th week atop the coin-op chart. Otherwise, nothing remarkable is happening this week. Bobby Scott debuts his only Top 40 hit, “Chain Gang,” on both sales charts. This is not the same song as the Sam Cooke “Chain Gang” from 1960.

One surprising chart discrepancy does appear this week. Eddie Fisher, a very radio-friendly singer, just now debuts on the radio chart with “Dungaree Doll.” The song debuted on the sales charts on December 24, 1955, and it’s a Top Ten hit on the short sales chart. Everything will balance out in the end, but the radio delay is puzzling.

January 19, 1957: Guy Mitchell reigns on all four charts, in some cases for the 8th week, with “Singing the Blues,” which he’s not doing. His future competition looms, with “Young Love” by Sonny James at #4 on the short sales chart, and an even stronger version by Tab Hunter debuting there at #12. Rushed out by Dot Records to compete with James, the Hunter version will outrank James, though both will reach #1 at some point.

A much-anthologized song, “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia, debuts on the long sales chart this week. This is their only Top 40 hit together, but Sylvia Vanderpool will come back in 1973 with the sensuous “Pillow Talk.”

Finally, all of the “Banana Boat” covers are on the long sales chart, with Steve Lawrence, the Fontane Sisters and Sarah Vaughan joining the Tarriers and Harry Belafonte this week.

January 20, 1958: “At the Hop” is the #1 “dance sensation that’s sweeping the nation,” except on radio, where the DJs are propping up Pat Boone’s “April Love.” Even they will give Danny and the Juniors a #1 hit soon.

A pair of One-Hit Wonders debut on the sales charts, with the Crescendos “Oh Julie” seeing less long-term fame than “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes. Radio is making a hit of “Magic Moments” by Perry Como, the B-side of “Catch a Falling Star.” Both are prominent radio hits, but they won’t see the sales charts until February 3.

January 19, 1959: This week’s #1 song almost was not recorded. The Platters’ version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was challenged by the publishing owners, as the song would then be associated with a black artist. When the money started pouring in, presumably the R&B association became less problematic.

Among the debuts, it’s time to push a Ritchie Valens song, “La Bamba,” to coincide with his national tour as part of the Winter Dance Party. Being matched up on this tour with the likes of Dion and Buddy Holly and the Crickets is quite the career boost for this young Mexican-American singer.

A future school-band favorite debuts this week as well: Ray Anthony’s “Peter Gunn” theme. It’s one of just two instrumentals on this chart, along with Reg Owens’s “Manhattan Spiritual, but the instrumentals are doing better here than they were in 1957, when, as of next week, none will be on the sales charts.

For your listening pleasure, I am including three versions of the “Banana Boat Song.” I would give you all five, but the Lawrence and Fontane versions didn’t make it here in time. The Tarriers version is scratchy. To make up for that, here are Sylvia’s two forays into the Top 40. Yes, it’s the same girl.

For Wednesday, I’ll explore spoken-word comedy from the early days of music. See you then!

Tarriers, Banana Boat Song

Harry Belafonte, Banana Boat (Day-O)

Sarah Vaughan, Banana Boat Song

Mickey and Sylvia, Love Is Strange

Sylvia, Pillow Talk

Moon Memories

2009-01-13T23:44:00.000-06:00

In my three-tiered approach to music blogging for 2009, I have brought you two Saturdays of the 1950s charts, in summary. On Wednesdays, I am alternating between Really Old Music (ROM) and Really Interesting Female Artists (RIFA). Today, we look at our first RIFA.

But first, I want to let you know about a six-day music event that will be taking place beginning January 28, 2009 in a little town called Clear Lake, Iowa. Like many of us, I became aware of the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in late 1971 via the epic single “American Pie.” I finally was able to visit the crash site in August, 2007, and I made a mental note to see what would be done to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. As it turns out, there will be a number of significant events at the Surf Ballroom, including a February 2 concert featuring Bobby Vee and an incredible array of artists. There are exhibits and symposia available during the day, concerts at night (some sold out, sorry), and the big show on the 50th anniversary of Buddy’s last concert. The event, run by Bobby Vee’s sons Jeff and Tommy, will be as fitting a tribute as can be imagined. Check out the details of 50 Winters Later. Go to Iowa.

I am a bit honked off that you won’t see me there. I planned 17 months ahead of time to show up, and I was planning to take the time off work and write up the event for a magazine, when I was asked (sort of told) that I was needed to chaperone a school trip to Spain beginning January 30. If you’re a casual music fan, it probably will strike you as smug that I claim to prefer Iowa over Spain that week, especially since Spain comes free to chaperones. But the serious music people here will get it, and, you know what? Spain will be here on February 3 and beyond, but this event will be history. Oh, I am steamed.

Now, the post:

Music journalists have, or used to have before the industry tanked, promo CDs tossed their way when an artist is coming to town. In my role as preview writer for the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival in Bloomington, Indiana, I got Christmas in September each year for ten years, as all thirty or so acts sent me CDs. Some are great, some are good, some bring Festival memories to life.

The beauty of the Lotus Festival is its willingness to continue to book artists with a medium-sized following. Sometimes an artist catches on with the crowd, and by the end of the Festival, all of Bloomington is abuzz with that artist’s music and persona.

The woman who strolled into town on the strength of her sophomore album was unassuming, and she remains so. However, she had the courage to write personal songs of nostalgia that held a flavor so strongly regional that, if the stories didn’t resonate on a universal level, only Alabama and Georgia residents would have listened to them.

This acoustic guitarist/singer/songwriter was named Kate Campbell. She was born in 1961 in New Orleans, and you can hear it in her voice. Her vowels have more nuance to them than snowflakes have shapes, and she gives her final r’s a healthy dose of Southern grrrrit. She writes about women who want to escape the life the South has imposed on them, about musicians who make it sort of big and then pay through the nose for it, and about the moon.

The album she was promoting in 1997 was Moonpie Dreams (Compass 4238), and its fascination with cars, Southern tourist meccas and deeply Southern individuals served to expand the region’s cachet into the rest of the country, rather than shrink its listener base. It helped that her producer was Johnny Pierce, who has since been collecting Grammy nominations for his production work. The album earned some love: at the 1997 Nashville Music Awards, it was nominated for Folk Album of the Year. Mojo Magazine called it the Country Album of the Year.

In October, 2008, Kate released her twelfth album, Save the Day. Her songs here show a career-long theme of literary references, and she has earned the vocal and instrumental participation of the likes of Spooner Oldham, Nanci Griffith, John Prine and Mac McAnally.

As much as she has grown as a songwriter over the years, I don’t think any of her work will, for me, overshadow Moonpie Dreams, on which she worked a reference to the moon into every song. The cohesive view of life in the everyday South is one of the few façade-free looks into that part of the world that I have ever come across. Instead of singing about a girl who thinks some guy’s tractor is sexy, Kate sings about a woman who wants to see Rock City and Lookout Mountain.

I’m choosing for you two of the songs that typify Kate’s worldview on Moonpie Dreams. I hope you enjoy them, despite your lack of memories to transport you back to warm September evenings in 1997, when Kate came to town to play these songs for us.

Saturday, it’s more 1950s chart action, and a week from now, I’ll go back to the pioneer days of music. See you Saturday!

Kate Campbell, See Rock City

Kate Campbell, Bascom’s Blues

The Great Chart Meltdown: Week 2

2009-01-10T01:30:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

This week’s 1950s charts bring us the first four-version hit of the year, in the guise of a song that was written as “Let Me Go Devil” but became a hit when the “Devil” was dropped, sort of like the Tampa Bay [Devil] Rays. Maybe there’s something to that devil business.

January 8, 1955: This is the week that “Let Me Go, Lover!” shows up in four different versions, including a one-week appearance on the radio chart by Sunny Gale. “Mr. Sandman” still rules the sales chart, for the 6th week, and it is in fact the unanimous three-chart #1 song. Joan Weber’s “Let Me Go Lover” drops temporarily from #1 on radio. A second version of “Melody of Love” joins Billy Vaughn’s hit; David Carroll is responsible for this one. A future mammoth #1 hit, “Sincerely” by the McGuire Sisters, debuts this week on the sales chart.

January 14, 1956: Dean Martin dethrones “Sixteen Tons” by “Tennessee” Ernie Ford on both sales charts and the radio chart with a Terry Gilkyson tune, “Memories Are Made of This.” Ernie will hang on for two more weeks on the juke boxes. The Turbans show themselves to be the truest form of One-Week Wonder, as they spend just one week on the Top 100, and never hit any other Top 40 pop chart again. Their hit, “When You Dance,” spent 21 weeks in the Top 100 and jumped to #33 for one magical week. Then they were gone.

This week, a true low point of 1950s pop makes its debut: “Go On with the Wedding” by Patti Page rears its ugly head. The song tells the tale of a young lady who was in love with Jim. Jim went missing and was declared dead. So, the young lady fell in love with Fred, whose name conveniently rhymes with dead. She is about to marry Fred when someone enters the church: Jim. He says they should go on with the wedding and forget about him. But Fred, sensing the strength of a love that could make Jim return from the grave, tells Jim to marry the girl. This is so wrong. First of all, Jim had no business showing up and then claiming he didn’t want to mess up Fred’s good thing. And there was no way in the 1950s that Jim would be allowed to marry this girl without blood tests and some sort of waiting period. Years of being dead don’t count as a waiting period. Conclusion: this is one of the lamest story songs of the 1950s. This Gabler-Korb-Purvis-Yakus composition even found a second taker, Kitty Kallen and Georgie Shaw. And the public made them both hits, of a sort.

January 5, 1957: The “Banana Boat” craze begins today, though it seems to be a radio-perpetrated phenomenon, to start with. The Tarriers (Erik Darling, Bob Carey and the actor Alan Arkin) are in the Top Ten on both the sales chart and radio, but radio has added three other versions, including Harry Belafonte’s. There’s more to come on the Top 100 next week, if you can believe that. “Banana Boat” is part of an ongoing larger Calypso surge, as shown by Harry Belafonte’s “Jamaica Farewell.” Where will it end?

Fats Domino’s two-sided hit “Blue Monday”/“What’s the Reason I’m not Pleasing You” hits the sales chart, and “Blue Monday” debuts on the Top 100, but “Blueberry Hill” is the blue song still getting the airplay and the nickels. When it comes to blues songs, Guy Mitchell is still #1 with “Singing the Blues,” and Marty Robbins’s version is still charting, at a much lower level.

January 13, 1958: There are still three versions of “Raunchy” on the charts (Bill Justis, Ernie Freeman, and Billy Vaughn), but technically there are now two, as the nation has flipped Billy Vaughn’s version and made a hit of “Sail Along Silvery Moon.” While his “Raunchy” made it to #10, the other side will climb to #5 and spend 21 weeks in the Top 40.

The McGuire sisters are debuting yet another song that will peak at #1, “Sugartime.” Radio has made a hit of Perry Como’s “Catch a Falling Star,” which won’t show strong sales until February. But it’s Perry, so radio is all over a sure thing.

January 12, 1959: The Chipmunks are still at #1 with a Christmas-themed hit. How much money was that franchise worth after this song? The three little guys are keeping “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by the Platters out of the #1 spot, but not for long.

You would have thought that the 1955 hit, “Alabama Jubilee” by the Ferko String Band, would be the final Philadelphia-based string-band hit. But no, “Philadelphia USA” by the Nu Tornados is hanging on to its position in the lower third of the chart, almost four years after Ferko wore out its welcome. This is the last week of preaching by Anka, Hamilton & Nash, as “The Teen Commandments” finally goes away.

For your listening pleasure, I am including all four of the “Let Me Go, Lover!” hits. For two of the artists, New Jersey-born Joan Weber (1935-1981) and Sunny Gale (born Selma Segal in New Jersey in 1927), this would be their only hit, and Sunny’s version made her a One-Week Wonder, as only the radio got her into the Top 40 book. The other two versions come from 1950s vocal heavyweights who jumped into the fray. The varying punctuation is a result of the labels’ attempt to differentiate their recordings.

Since I mentioned “Go On with the Wedding,” I really have to include it as well. It’s quite the song.

For Wednesday, I’m bringing you a female singer-songwriter who came up with one of my favorite albums of the late 1990s. See you then!

Joan Weber, Let Me Go Lover

Patti Page, Let Me Go, Lover!

Teresa Brewer with the Lancers, Let Me Go, Lover!

Sunny Gale, Let Me Go, Lover!

Patti Page, Go On with the Wedding

Define Prolific

2009-01-06T21:52:00.000-06:00

In my three-tiered approach to music blogging for 2009, I have brought you Week One of the 1950s charts, in summary. On Wednesdays, I will alternate between Really Old Music (ROM) and Really Interesting Female Artists (RIFA). Today, we look at our first ROM.

First, I want to give you a glimpse into the difficulties the pioneers of music faced. At the very beginning in the late 1880s (once people realized recording devices would be a great way to capture music), the entire process was acoustic—no microphones, no second track for overdubs. If you were going to record a duet, you waited until both artists were available. The recording pickup was either a small horn or a large, long one. Depending on the strength of an artist’s voice, he or she had to stand a specified distance from the horn. One of these weeks, I’ll bring you a distance test, in which a singer sang at varying distances from the horn so the recording’s producer could create the most appealing recording possible.

Again, at the very beginning, one take equaled one cylinder for sale. If twenty orders came in for a particular song, the singer made twenty takes. The cylinder was recorded by hand for both the recording and playback process, though battery-operated players came along quickly, as hand-cranking could be a bit tedious.

So could all those recording takes, so in short order (1890) Edison’s company figured out a way to duplicate a handful, and then more than one hundred, copies of a recording. But one hundred copies still meant a lot of takes for songs that sold well.

Another issue with early music was the inability of acoustic recording equipment to record string instruments acceptably. Thus, the accompaniment for most pioneer singers consisted of horn ensembles or solo piano. Until 1925, this was the way things were done. After that, electricity powered voices and allowed the recording of quiet instruments. Bass and treble recording and playback improved greatly at that point.

But in 1903, the world of recorded music was still very young when a man named Henry Burr released his first significant recording, “The Rosary.”

Henry Burr was one of multiple pseudonyms for Harry McClaskey, born in 1882 in New Brunswick. Harry’s other principal pseudonym was Irving Gillette, used for Edison recordings, but he used a different name for nearly every label. On Columbia, Henry Burr rose quickly to stardom, and his listeners seem to have figured out that Irving Gillette was Harry in disguise.

Henry formed part of the first big wave of popular music, the tenors and quartets. The tenors were often Irish, and they all sang in a classical style. Henry himself received serious training in New York, and the proximity to the recording industry allowed him to become Columbia’s new tenor, to replace the fading George J. Gaskin.

Apart from his solo work, Henry formed part of the Columbia Male Quartet, which renamed itself the Peerless Quartet before 1910. He also recorded duets with a number of artists, most notably Frank Stanley and Albert Campbell. Though the charts of the time were haphazard and subject to interpretation, Henry logged 116 solo chart hits, as well as 48 with Campbell and 12 with Stanley. The Peerless Quartet scored 108 hits. Thus, looking at just these combinations, Henry Burr hit the charts, which generally allowed for ten songs per chart, 284 times.

Henry cornered a prestigious market when he became the primary voice for George M. Cohan’s songs. Henry devoted much of 1916-1918 to recordings that would comfort and invigorate American music fans during the Great War. In his 25-year recording career, he hit the #1 spot at least 31 times with his various collaborations and solo work. He was also one of the first artists to sing on the radio, and he got into the radio business when his recording career ended.

But all of this pales when you consider the following: Harry McClaskey recorded at least 5,000 releases, and with the need for multiple takes, he made more than 12,000 actual recordings. No one has come close to that total for prolific recording.

Henry Burr popularized a large number of songs we consider to be the kind you learn to play when you are at the midpoint of your piano lessons, songs you hear on old TV: “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree” (#1, 1905), “Peg O’ My Heart” (#2, 1913), “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” (with Albert Campbell, #1, 1919), “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” (Peerless Quartet, #1, 1911), “Shine On, Harvest Moon” (with Frank Stanley, #2, 1909), and the like.

Today, I’ll give you a listen to several hits, including a #10 hit from 1927 that was revived on his label, Victor, in the hands of another artist, who took it to #1 in 1960.

Online fact sources include Wikipedia, the amazing Henry Burr website, Archeophone Records and Tinfoil.com. Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories, 1890-1954 includes considerable information on the early era. Some recordings (marked UCSB) are available to you free at the UC Santa Barbara Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.

Saturday, I’m back to the 1950s charts. And for next Wednesday, I’ll feature a female singer-songwriter from south of my home state of Indiana, which means she lives pretty far from here. See you Saturday!

In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree, 1905

Shine On, Harvest Moon, 1909

Are You Lonesome To-night?, 1927

Softly and Tenderly, 1909

The Great Chart Meltdown: Week One

2009-01-02T23:29:00.000-06:00

For the background on this blog series, see this post.

Today I embark on what I hope will be a year-long exploration of the 1950s Rock Era music charts. There is a lot of information available that cannot be translated into mere numbers, and since many people do not have easy access to the charts used to produce those books, I want to shed some light on the formative years of rock and roll. Follow the charts with me; this week, I’m looking at the first week of the year for each year, 1955 to 1959.

January 1, 1955: The Rock and Roll Era begins, though the symbolic first rock-and-roll song won’t show up until May. Right away, we are faced with a subtle misnomer. Joan Weber’s “Let Me Go Lover” is widely proclaimed as the first #1 hit of the Rock Era, but a look at the charts may make you see things differently.

“Mr. Sandman” is a holdover #1 from December, 1954, but it’s not fading on January 1. It’s #1 on the sales chart, and it will stay there for two more weeks. It’s #1 on coin-ops, and it has another week of life left at #1. Only the radio chart has “Let Me Go Lover” at #1, thanks to listener demand, but “Mr. Sandman” will displace it at the top on both January 8 and January 22. So it’s more accurate to say that “Mr. Sandman” and “Let Me Go Lover” were the first #1 songs of the Rock and Roll Era.

There’s a bit of evidence that rock and roll is on the way. Bill Haley and His Comets are on the sales chart with both “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Dim, Dim the Lights.” Both sport the upbeat shuffle of “Rock Around the Clock”; it’s just the explosion of popularity and the rebel-movie tie-in that makes “Rock” so iconic.

A point to make about the industry in the 1950s is that competing versions of pop songs often charted at the same time. At one point, it was common practice for white artists to cover songs by R&B artists that would not have made it to pop radio. The same practice happened in reverse, though less frequently and more quietly. Splitting an audience (and income) between two artists often made a song seem less successful on the charts than it was from a songwriters’ standpoint. If the sales of all the charting versions of “Unchained Melody” were combined, for example, the song would have stayed at #1 far longer than it did with buyers and listeners being pulled four ways.

One odd novelty tune debuts this week: “Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sun Shine In)” by the Cowboy Church Sunday School. The singers are the wife and daughters of Stuart Hamblen, who wrote “This Ole House,” along with a couple of other teen girls. Hamblen sped up the record to make the girls sound younger, but he didn’t go to Chipmunks lengths.

January 7, 1956: The monster #1 is “Sixteen Tons” by “Tennessee” Ernie Ford, in its seventh and final week on top. The final Christmas song, “Nuttin’ for Christmas” by Barry Gordon with Art Mooney’s Orchestra, suffers a precipitous drop after this week. Both Sisters and Fours are big, with the Fontanes, the McGuires, the Lads and the Aces. Songs appearing twice include “Only You” (Platters, Hilltoppers) “Memories Are Made of This” (Dean Martin, Gale Storm), “Teen Age Prayer” (Gale Storm, Gloria Mann) and “He” (Al Hibbler, McGuire Sisters).

Songs with lasting resonance include Gale Storm’s “I Hear You Knocking.” Dave Edmunds seems to have listened to her version a lot before recording his 1971 hit. Frank Sinatra’s “Love and Marriage” will come back to haunt us as a TV theme, but thankfully Dinah Shore’s version, which made the radio chart for one week in December 1955, will not.

January 5, 1957: The year starts with one of the longest-running #1 songs still atop the sales heap: Guy Mitchell’s “Singing the Blues,” in its fifth week of 9. Right behind it is “The Green Door” by erstwhile DJ Jim Lowe. This song counts as a #1 hit, but it never topped the main sales chart. Look at its amazing run, though. On the sales chart since September 29, 1956, it reached #3 in its fourth week. It sat there, behind “Hound Dog”/“Don’t Be Cruel” at #1 and “Love Me Tender” at #2, for three weeks. Then it moved to #2, sitting behind “Love Me Tender” for three weeks. “Singing the Blues” jumped it, sending it to #3 for five weeks. When “Love Me Tender” faded, “The Green Door” still had three weeks at #2 left in it. All told, It was #3 or higher for 14 straight weeks, and its competition was some of the toughest ever. Not bad for a ditty recorded in a New York City hotel room. “The Green Door” spent three weeks at #1 on the long chart and the coin-op chart, but radio stalled it at #2 for six weeks, with several more at #3.

Calypso is riding high in early 1957, with “Mary’s Boy Child” by Harry Belafonte serving as the Calypso Christmas tune. Belafonte also is still doing well with his debut hit, “Jamaica Farewell.” But the very scary Banana Boat craze is just getting its oars wet, as the Tarriers have the lone hit version, in its third week. By January 19, there will be five versions in the Top 40 of the long chart. Details later!

This is, notably, the final sales chart week for “Don’t Be Cruel”/“Hound Dog,” the biggest two-sided #1 in history. Since Elvis Presley succeeded that pair at #1 with “Love Me Tender,” you can see that late 1956 was a good quarter for Elvis. By contrast, another entertainer known for goofy films, Jerry Lewis, is enjoying the only singing hit of his career, “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” peaking at #10 this week. He also charted for one week with a Martin-Lewis comedy sketch in 1948.

Speaking of entertainment legends, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly team up for a Top Ten Best Seller, “True Love.” Apart from “White Christmas,” this is Bing’s only foray into the Rock Era Top Ten. Grace Kelly didn’t chart again, but she didn’t have to, being a princess and all.

R&B artists account for seven of the Top 40 on the long chart, four of the 21 coin-op hits, and just two of the 25 radio hits. Fats Domino is in good shape with “Blueberry Hill” (Top Ten on sales, the long chart and the coin-op chart), but radio resistance has him at just #15 there, which probably contributed to his failure to achieve the only #1 of his storied career. He spent three weeks at #2 on the coin-op chart, so someone was playing that song . . .

This is the debut week for another phenomenon, “Young Love.” The Sonny James original shows up on all but the coin-op chart, and it may be so hot and new that it’s not on many boxes yet. Competition looms from Dot Records. Which leads to another interesting point. Little Dot, from Nashville, boasts three sales hits this week, and the label tends to stay in that range for much of the late 1950s. Using a mix of white covers of R&B tunes, most notoriously those of Pat Boone, and some nicely chosen originals and licensed material, Randy Wood, the label’s owner, turned his appliance-repair shop/record store into quite the big deal. The interesting thing is that he was known for fairness, so his artists stayed put once they became huge successes.

January 6, 1958: We seem finally to have shed the smooshy slow numbers of the 1955-57 charts, at least as far as sales go. This is one energetic group of sales hits: “At the Hop” by Danny & the Juniors leads the way, followed by Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie,” and Chuck Berry’s “Rock & Roll Music,” among others, and not in 1-5 order. The slower material doesn’t sound so early 1950s now, with Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” being a prime example.

The radio chart still leans toward the mellow side of pop music. “April Love” by Pat Boone is at #1 for the fourth week, while Frank Sinatra’s “All the Way” is at #2, “You Send Me” is at #3, and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” by Jimmie Rodgers holds down #4. “At the Hop” is meeting radio resistance at #5. There is no such drag on “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters, which debuts on the radio chart at #14 before it hits the Top 40 in either sales chart.

You may notice that I have not mentioned the coin-op chart; its final chart came on June 17, 1957, as the first step toward simplifying the calculation of chart rankings. The juke box operators’ data still figure in the Top 100 calculations, but there is one fewer song listing to peruse.

The voice of Buddy Holly is in heavy selling rotation, both under his own name (“Peggy Sue” in the Top Ten) and with the Crickets (“Oh, Boy!” at #14). Radio is playing both hits, though at lower chart levels than sales would indicate. These two records will give Buddy three straight Top Ten hits to start his chart career.

Although the song entered both sales charts this week, no one is likely to suspect right now the eventual chart success, or the enduring legacy, of “The Stroll” by the Diamonds. Next week, it hits the radio, though the teens have been matching the steps to songs on American Bandstand for a little while.

Despite this week’s preference for rock and roll, one solid mid-twenties performer on the sales charts is Will Glahé’s “Liechtensteiner Polka.” The song is still selling well enough to merit a one-week return to the radio chart as well.

Sales B-sides this week not mentioned in the Top 40 books: “You Bug Me, Baby” by Larry Williams (“Bony Moronie”), “Chicago” by Frank Sinatra (“All the Way”), and three Sam Cooke tunes: “Desire Me” (“(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons”), “Summertime” (“You Send Me”) and “Forever” (“I’ll Come Running Back to You”). Each of these songs charted on the long chart but did not reach the Top 40, thus prompting their exclusion from the Top 40 book.

January 5, 1959: The time lag in chart-release dates often means that Christmas-themed music debuts now, but “The Chipmunk Song” by David Seville and the Chipmunks debuted on December 8, 1958 and is now in its third week at #1 on the consolidated chart. This is, surely, a song no one would expect to find on the radio fifty years hence, but here it is!

With all of the charts peeled away from the consolidated chart, the Top 40 is easier to examine for trends. The Top Ten is a quiet place, with only “Whole Lotta Loving” by Fats Domino and “Problems” by the Everly Brothers displaying a fast tempo. There are a lot of threes and sixes in the other tempos, with the Chipmunks, “To Know Him, Is to Love Him” by the Teddy Bears, “One Night” by Elvis Presley, and “My Happiness” by Connie Francis avoiding 4/4 beats.

Most of the rock songs are relegated to the lower end of the chart, at least for now. Duane Eddy’s “Cannonball,” Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody” (a One-Week Wonder) and “Stagger Lee” by Lloyd Price, a future monster smash debuting low, fit the template. But only one song discusses rock, and that’s “All-American Boy” by Bill Parsons, who was at first billed on the chart as Billy Parson. The artist is really Bobby Bare, eventually to add a Senior to his name when his son grows up and starts his own recording career.

In the “what were they thinking” category is “Don’t Pity Me,” a One-Week Wonder for Dion and the Belmonts at #40. Their string of revived really old standards (“When You Wish Upon a Star?”) goes nowhere, and when Dion breaks up with the Belmonts, both he and the boys go back to uptempo numbers, and both acts thrive to varying degrees.

Whereas earlier years find R&B artists scarce on the pop charts, they have achieved 25% participation as 1959 begins: the Platters, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, Tommy Edwards, Clyde McPhatter, LaVern Baker and Lloyd Price are some of the artists taking part. Debuting their second and final Top 40 hit are Billy & Lillie with the charming “Lucky Ladybug.”

Apart from the Chipmunks, Christmas is represented by “The Little Drummer Boy” by the Harry Simeone Chorale, another perennial track that premieres this year. Teen Morality is represented by “The Teen Commandments,” an amazing ABC-Paramount infomercial foisted onto the backs of Paul Anka, George Hamilton IV and Johnny Nash.

Error alert: Speaking of Mr. Anka, his new hit “(All of a Sudden) My Heart Sings” is listed in the Top 40 books as having debuted on January 5, 1959. The full chart book shows that the song debuted on December 22, 1958, but it doesn’t clarify the situation: The song debuted at #39 on that date, dropped to #43 for December 29, and re-entered the Top 40 at #37 on January 5. Don’t let this correction change your life, but you may want to adjust your book.

That, my friends, is my attempt to cram a bunch of chart info into one blog post. There’s a lot of detail here, and that requires some selectivity as to what I mention. If you want to comment about something I didn’t point out, or ask questions, the comment box is all yours.

Tunes? How about a rare One-Hit Wonder debut from 1955 and a look into what the studio sounded like when the Chipmunks came to life? Next Saturday, again I’ll bring you all the chart data you can digest at one sitting! (And I hope to be able to use more precise chart terminology by then.)

For Wednesday, I’ll profile the most prolific recording artist of all time. See you then!

Cowboy Church Sunday School, Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sun Shine In)

The Chipmunk Song, excerpts slowed to normal voice speed

The Great Chart Meltdown: Guidelines

2009-01-02T23:26:00.000-06:00

This year, my Saturday posts will focus on the music charts of the 1950s. I’ll combine a “This week in 195X” approach with a glance at odd trends and, on rare occasion, discrepancies between the charts (which I have before me as I write) and the books that summarize the charts, some of which you may own.

The principal music-industry publication used several different charts during the 1950s. One (25-30 songs) measured sales alone, another (20 songs) showed what coin-operated machines played, a third (20 songs) did radio surveys, and by mid-1955 there was a chart that tried to give a combined ranking of 100 songs.

The problem for anyone trying to compile data from the various charts would be one of space; it is impossible to confine a song’s chart performance to one line without making some compromises. In the chart books we own, a song that is pushed into the Top Ten by radio people is considered as valid a hit as a Top Ten single that was propelled by sales. My suggestion is that, should you want to know how strong a particular single really was, you look at the tiny chart peaks listed by each 1950s single from 1955 to late 1958.

Apart from such discrepancies as songs that never hit the radio chart but sell very well (a phenomenon I can’t discuss in great detail until I receive permission to quote the actual charts), there is one type of compilation decision I will want to address each week.

If you own a book about Top 40 hits, you will note that some songs are listed as having been flip sides to hits. The sales chart, and to some extent the radio and coin-op charts, listed B-sides that seemed to drive some of the sales or plays. All of these songs appear in the books that compile the entire chart of 100 hits.

However, a procedural decision was made regarding Top 40 B-sides. If a song was listed as a B-side on a chart, it appears in the book as long as it did not chart elsewhere. If it climbed onto a chart as an independent song but failed to reach #40, the B-side disappears from the Top 40 book.

For example, “High School Dance” by Larry Williams is listed in the Top 40 book as the sales B-side of “Short Fat Fannie.” By the same token, “You Bug Me, Baby” appeared on the sales chart as the non-charting flip of “Bony Moronie,” so it should appear in the Top 40 book in some fashion.

However, “You Bug Me, Baby” charted independently. It fell short of #40 in several weeks on the combined chart of 100 songs. That means it was probably more significant as a B-side than was “High School Dance,” but its failure to reach the Top 40 on any chart means that it is left out of the Top 40 books altogether. Those who own just the Top 40 book will have no record of the record. I will, therefore, note B-sides that aren’t mentioned in the Top 40 books.

Seeing the 1950s charts up close is a fascinating exercise in historical interpretation. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

The Countdown, on "Paper"

2008-12-31T22:59:00.000-06:00

As promised, here are the Top Ten of Blog Year 2008, in order. I apologize to Eastern Hemisphere readers for making you wait into midday on January 1.

10. Kim, Andy: Baby, I Love You
9. Highwaymen: The Gypsy Rover
8. Greene, Marlin: General of Broken Hearts
7. Hefti, Neal: Batman Theme
6. Mellencamp, Johnny Cougar: Under the Boardwalk
5. Kim, Andy: Be My Baby
4. Archies: Sugar, Sugar
3. McNamara, Robin: Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me
2. Pérez Prado and His Orchestra: Why Wait
1. ABBA: I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do

Again, Happy New Year to everyone.

2008: Great Vinyl Countdown

2008-12-30T21:23:00.000-06:00

Before I delve into reader favorites, I want to wrap up a couple of themes from Blog Year 2008 (which I could call BY1 if I wanted to feel self-important). First, I want to point out that I have reacquired a lot of my childhood 45s, but at this point I own about 50 of 300+ records. I suspect that total included about 50 LPs, but even so, there are a lot of 45s I can’t remember.

I do know some labels, and even some titles, of lost 45s. I owned titles on Argo and Wand, for example, and while I have perused discographies, I haven’t had success in recalling which 45s I might have owned. Roulette presents even greater difficulties, since I know a number of songs released on that label, and my memory of what I owned can become intertwined with the songs I’ve known.

I might have a bit more luck with Cub (an MGM subsidiary) and Soma (or is it SOMA?). If I dig out the proper memories there, I’ll tell you. I haven’t tried to find thorough discographies yet.

I blogged about “Beans in My Ears,” but in addition to the hit version, I owned the HIT version. I may buy it someday to compare the two recordings, but it’s not as critical as some songs I haven’t heard at all since 1972.

For example, there’s “Can’t See the Forest (For the Trees),” or something very similar to that. The 45 had a red label with a black serrated edge. That’s what I know. The phrase is such a cliché that search engines aren’t much help. If I get a Goldmine book, I may have a chance of finding the record, but for now, it’s a dead end.

Another cliché title, but this time, one with a melody I can recall, is “Holy Mackerel, Andy.” The obvious problem is that the title refers to Amos ‘n’ Andy, whereas the song may not be related to the duo. The singer sort of yells the title, then says, “Dig that crazy beat.” Overall, the song reminds me of “People Sure Act Funny (When They Get a Lotta Money)” by Titus Turner, but I can’t pin this one down.

And finally, I enjoyed a version of “Money Honey” that I had on a 4-song EP with a green label. This one makes for another rough, cluttered search.

If you have been reading the blog since early days, you know I posted two mystery sides from a 45 whose label fell off before I learned to read. While a couple of good educated guesses led me down some valid avenues of research, no encyclopedic pop musicologist stepped forward to solve the mystery. And so, my thirty years of sleepless nights continue. That would be my one disappointment about getting into this blogging thing.

Preamble over. Now, the results of the voting for the Great Vinyl Countdown.

First, note that the methodology used for the GVC is completely ridiculous. It’s not based on sales, or downloads (which would favor the later songs), or Arbitron ratings. I didn’t force a poll on anyone. So the votes came from readers who like to puzzle out lists of favorite songs.

Most of them like the work of Jeff Barry, so he is well-represented here. As much of his stuff as I featured on the blog, it still accounted for no more than ten percent of the available choices. So don’t blame me for that one.

Speaking of that, I didn’t vote. I did break a four-way tie for tenth place, ’cause it’s my blog, and I didn’t want to post 13 songs.

One thing I did was create an audio countdown of the songs. I split it into two files, 10-6 and 5-1, and they both run around 17 minutes. If you listen to it, you’ll hear the songs in order. For the sake of not spoiling the audio countdown for readers, I’ll post the ten songs here in alphabetical order now. I’ll list them in order at midnight, US Eastern time, on December 31.

When it comes to radio technique, I’m no jb or Yah Shure, so don’t expect an American Top 40 clone for this countdown. I could have tried to run it that way, but I wanted to include more background on the songs than such a format would have allowed. I sound much more community radio than Top 40 here, and my experience is in community radio anyway.

Here are the ten songs that ranked highest among voting readers. I received more votes than I expected, and fewer than I could accommodate, but it was fun to see what people liked, especially when such completely unpredicted choices as “Pony Boy” and “Uh Oh” emerged. Thanks for your votes, and here’s what you chose:

ABBA: I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
Archies: Sugar, Sugar
Greene, Marlin: General of Broken Hearts
Hefti, Neal: Batman Theme
Highwaymen: The Gypsy Rover
Kim, Andy: Baby, I Love You
Kim, Andy: Be My Baby
McNamara, Robin: Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me
Mellencamp, Johnny Cougar: Under the Boardwalk
Pérez Prado: Why Wait

For Saturday, I’ll initiate a new weekly feature called 1950s Chart Quirks. Eventually I hope to expand it into a “This Week on the Charts in 195X,” but I am waiting for the legal blessing of the various charts compilers before I get too deep into that concept. On Wednesdays, I’ll alternate between profiles of music pioneers and female artists you may or may not know.

Thanks for your patronage in 2008. I’m looking forward to expanding your musical consciousness further in 2009, this time with songs that have actual legacies. Happy New Year, and I’ll see you Saturday!

Great Vinyl Countdown audio 10-6
Great Vinyl Countdown audio 5-1

ABBA: I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
Archies: Sugar, Sugar
Greene, Marlin: General of Broken Hearts
Hefti, Neal: Batman Theme
Highwaymen: The Gypsy Rover
Kim, Andy: Baby, I Love You
Kim, Andy: Be My Baby
McNamara, Robin: Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me
Mellencamp, Johnny Cougar: Under the Boardwalk
Pérez Prado: Why Wait

2008: Final Vinyl

2008-12-26T21:52:00.000-06:00

One thing I learned from traveling abroad is that some of the music is better “over there.” Nowadays, you can have the same experience if you listen to radio stations that stream online, but in 1979, no one had invented the internet.

So, to get you through to the Great Vinyl Countdown, here are two pieces I picked up in Mexico. In 1979, I went to Mexico for a four-week language course and a four-week homestay in Colima, the lovely capital of Colima, on the Pacific coast. My trip came on scholarship, thanks to the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, which rewarded my Spanish skills as measured by their National Spanish Exam.

During the summer of 1979, two songs dominated the discos. One was, to my dismay, the second-wave Mexican surge of a spring, 1979 US hit: “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor. While I almost did not survive that second bombardment, the other phenomenon rocked my world: “Disco Samba” by Two Man Sound.

Two Man Sound was the brainchild of two Belgians, Lou Depryck and Sylvain Vanholmen. They took snippets of famous Samba tunes, including several by Jorge Ben, and turned them into a precursor to Stars on 45 that was as huge a hit in Mexico as Stars was in the USA in 1981. Two Man Sound managed to make the US disco chart as well, but I don’t have details.

All I know about this recording is that, no matter the type of party at which I play it, it draws everyone to the dance floor. Do come back to read the rest of the post when you’re done dancing.

Fast forward to 1980: I made enough friends in Colima that I was able to return the next summer without having to stay in a hotel. That year, the disco was playing a couple of songs I found intriguing. The Disco Era was over, and when people danced now, they sort of hopped up and down in place, because the beats were too fast for real dancing. The two big tunes were “Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s and “Rockabilly Rebel” by Matchbox.

Once I started looking for CDs of Matchbox material, the matter was confused by the appearance of a band called Matchbox 20, but it didn’t matter. Matchbox, a British act given to Buddy Holly covers, almost certainly failed to earn a US release for its wares. The UK and Mexican releases were on Magnet Records.

Matchbox consists of Graham Fenton (vocals), Steve Bloomfield (lead guitar, vocals), Gordon Scott (guitar), Fred Poke (bass) and Jimmy Redhead (drums). Some of the songs give Bloomfield writing credit, but I can’t confirm who wrote “Rockabilly Rebel,” because my LP is in a box in storage. This lineup is back together after some years apart, and they are playing all over Europe. Check them out.

Here’s a video version of “Disco Samba” that seems to have an overwhelming percussive element added. What the video has going for it is some stunning scenery, as well as some evidently Brazilian girls dancing in very short skirts.

And here’s Matchbox in a vintage lip-synch of “Rockabilly Rebel.” The video is truncated, unfortunately.

Finally, the stereo tracks on vinyl.

Wednesday, I’ll bring you the Great Vinyl Countdown of the ten most popular tracks from Blog Year 2008. See you then!

Two Man Sound, Disco Samba

Matchbox, Rockabilly Rebel

DJ for a Winter’s Eve

2008-12-24T00:09:00.000-06:00

A note: I can extend voting for the Great Vinyl Countdown, my December 31 post, until December 26. I’ve realized that the math isn’t that hard. Here's what you need to know to vote.

I should be getting maudlin right now. Fourteen months ago, the cosmos bestowed upon me the idea of sharing the 45s I owned as a baby. I wrote out the 2008 post schedule that October. The songs I could feature, that is, the ones I had reacquired after the Great Vinyl Meltdown, filled out 51 weeks. I took that as an omen, and I plowed ahead into the blogging world. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed more any endeavor that involved a whole year and considerable work.

On the way, I learned a lot, thanks to my fellow bloggers and the Blogger Who Won’t, Yah Shure. I made fast friends with Bobb Goldsteinn, who was just an icon before last April. And most of all, I began to feel as if I exist apart from my little home-to-work-to-home niche, because I didn’t start with ten readers per week and end up with two. At least a few people out there have read much of what was essentially a childhood memoir.

Next year will be more of a straight music-history blog from caithiseach, but 2008 involved a lot of personal musing, and the gracious people out there never intimated that I was stupid for spilling my guts or that I was . . . boring. If you just scrolled through the chatter to get to the song, at least you didn’t insist on telling me so.

And while there are two more posting days for 2008, I have used up all of my childhood vinyl as of today. Well, that’s not quite true; I didn’t feature “Sugar Moon” by Pat Boone (#5, 1958) or “Old Cape Cod” by Billy Vaughn and His Orchestra (actually the B-side of “The Sundowners,” #51 in 1960). Those Dot records seemed redundant, given my prior mention of Boone, Vaughn and Dot. For Saturday, I’ll bring you two pieces of vinyl from my college years. But today marks the end of this year-long theme of grooves that shaped me.

So, here we go. In 1965, my parents upgraded our record player to a stereo turntable that had removable speakers that could be placed wherever I wanted around the room. Very cool. With these new possibilities, an idea occurred to my mom: since people were coming over for Christmas festivities, we could make their walk up to the house that much more cheery if we played Christmas music for them.

So, my dad, being the electrician that he was, took the speakers outside, wrapped them in plastic, and ran the wires through the window. Since I was on break from Our Little Saints Kindergarten, I was put in charge of the considerable pile of Christmas LPs and singles while my parents undertook more menial and less important tasks like buying groceries.

Late that afternoon, when Mom was at WiseWay getting last-minute ingredients, I went to work. It was dark out, thanks to the Winter Solstice, but there was a big plastic snowman on the front lawn, and it was cheerily lighted. The speakers were sitting behind an evergreen shrub that lived beneath our picture window, so no one would have known from where the music emanated.

The only problem I encountered was that I couldn’t hear the music. Of course, I was indoors, and the windows were shut against the winter chill, but I had to be sure the music was actually playing.

Didn’t I?

Well, Mom came home, and while she wasn’t upset about the music, she did tell me she could hear it from the street with the car windows closed. I thought that was fine, since the neighbors deserved to share in the special cheer that only music, especially Christmas music, could bring. Mom went back outside and used hand signals to tell me when the music had reached the correct volume. I was not to crank it again. So I didn’t.

When she came in again, she told Dad, “I was coming down the street, and “Christmas in Killarney” was all I could hear. Who was singing that song anyway, little caithiseach?”

I was surprised that she didn’t know what songs were on LPs she had bought. I told her it was Bobby Vinton. There’s nothing like having a guy nicknamed the Polish Prince belting out a tune chock-full of Irish clichés. The album, A Very Merry Christmas (Epic 24122), contained such gems as “The Bell That Couldn’t Jingle” and “Christmas Chopsticks.” It was a very multicultural set, between Asian and Irish themes and tales of differently abled musical instruments.

Bobby Vinton, of course, is not a no-name with a crummy Christmas LP as his sole claim to infamy. Bobby, born Stanley Robert Vinton in 1935, was huge in the 1960s, with 26 Top 40 hits for the decade, including the #1 hits “Roses Are Red (My Love)” (1962), “Blue Velvet” and “There! I’ve Said It Again” (1963) and “Mr. Lonely” (1964). He took “Blue on Blue” to #3 in 1963 as well.

One misconception about Bobby’s career is that he went away and suddenly reappeared in 1974 with the #3 bilingual (English-Polish) smash “My Melody of Love.” In fact, he charted twice in 1972, so his hit hiatus was a mere three years. By the time his chart run really ended in 1975, he had logged 31 Top 40 entries. Not too bad for a Pennsylvania kid.

And what’s up with his hometown, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania? Whenever I look up one of those male crooners, he’s from that town. Perry Como, Bobby and all four of the Four Coins hail from Canonsburg. That’s six Top 40 vocalists out of 8,000 people. That would be the equivalent of 6,000 Top 40 singers from New York City, and I don’t think there are even half that many.

The song he was singing when Mom came home was written by a triumvirate of tone: James Cavanaugh (1892-1967) wrote 212 ASCAP titles, many related to specific locales: Birmingham (Alabama), Buffalo, Cuba, Georgia, Bizerte, Harlem, Grand Central Station, Texas, Scottish Highlands, Maine, Latin America, Hawaii, Honolulu, Hoboken (New Jersey), Mississippi, Germany, New England, France, Argentina, Pago Pago, Dixie, Mexico, Japan, Tipperary and, of course, Killarney. Hmm. Cavanaugh wrote “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You,” and he worked with people as distinguished as Chick Webb and Dean Martin.

John Redmond, author of 308 songs, wrote a number with Cavanaugh, and on his own, he showed a predilection for Hawaiian themes and the occasional Christian motif. A Cavanaugh-Redmond song written with Nat Simon, “The Gaucho Serenade,” was used in a number of films in the 1940s.

Frank Weldon, rounding out this group, penned 118 titles, including a number of the Cavanaugh-Redmond works. Two Cavanaugh-Weldon songs, “I Like Mountain Music” and “A Little on the Lonely Side” (the latter co-written by Dick Robertson), were also used in multiple films, in the 1930s and 1940s.

Produced by Robert Morgan, the Vinton album reached #13 on the Christmas LP chart. The album was selling like hotcakes while Bobby was at #1 with “Mr. Lonely.” But really, how could he be lonely when he had all those Irish folks doing jigs around him?

Now I’ll shift gears. For more than thirty years, it has been a New York City Christmas Eve tradition for a certain group of carolers to gather outside the former home of Irving Berlin, which is now the Luxembourg Consulate, at 17 Beekman Place. There, they regale the current residents with “White Christmas.” A couple of years ago, the event-coordination torch was passed to Bobb Goldsteinn, the writer of “Washington Square.” This year, as he mused on the event and the long-term significance of the tradition, he was given a song that expresses what the event means to him and to his fellow carolers.

Wednesday night, the Christmas Eve tradition continues, with the new song, which Bobb wrote in 45 minutes (the best inspirations happen quickly), sung as a prelude to “White Christmas.” The song is already recorded, and a video posted, so I will refer you to YouTube for the blog debut of “We HYMN ‘White Christmas.’”

And with those thoughts, I leave you to your celebrations of whichever seasonal event you choose. I am off to visit my dad, who contributed heavily to the home atmosphere that allowed me to collect so much vinyl and spend time enjoying it.

Saturday, I’ll bring you a pair of unusual songs I heard only during my summers in Mexico, one in 1979, the other in 1980. And a week from now, I’ll present the Great Vinyl Countdown as the final post of the original premise of the Great Vinyl Meltdown. Merry Christmas to you.

Bobby Vinton, Christmas in Killarney

Golden Angels in Little Boxes

2008-12-19T21:52:00.000-06:00

A note: I’m getting some interesting Top Tens from my 2008 blog songs for the Great Vinyl Countdown, which will involve a reposting of the ten reader favorites. Don’t let others vote out your preferences! Here's what you need to do about it.

Christmas was taken seriously at my house, and at those of my cousins. I have video (Super 8mm transferred to DVD) that shows all of us gathering together, and there were a lot of us. My mom was the youngest of ten children, and while none of my uncles and aunts reproduced to that degree, there were plenty of cousins.

We all gathered at my grandparents’ house in Gary, at 340 Adams, half a block from the South Shore electric railway. At night, you could see sparks from the electrical contacts that reached up from the engines to the overhead wires. Across the street was a row of apartment houses, dark-brown brick, and all around us were two-story frame houses. My grandmother sold the house in 1969, and in 1971, the City of Gary demolished it, because the new owners had left the doors and windows open to the elements, and it had become uninhabitable. Soon, so many houses would reach that state that the city simply stopped tearing them down; some sat as wrecks for twenty years, which you know if you have ever driven past Gary on the Indiana Tollway.

But in the mid-1960s, everyone in Gary was working in the steel mills, drugs had not taken hold as the primary local commodity, and Christmas was a superb time to go downtown.

At some point, my parents received from my cousin Manetta an LP of Christmas recordings played on music boxes. A Music Box Christmas (Columbia 8498) used music boxes from the collection of Rita Ford, a Manhattan purveyor of antique music boxes, to bring extraordinarily high-fidelity recordings of music as people would have heard it just before the dawn of the Recording Era.

Nowadays, when you open up a jewelry box or anything that has a little mechanical device, you get a tinkly sound that reminds me of water dripping. Not so with the Ford music boxes. They existed to produce the full dynamic range of sound, a substitute for the not-yet-existent technology for recording musicians. While today’s little boxes play one song, these machines played cylinders or platters that could be swapped out, with new songs available at music stores. The larger music boxes undoubtedly served as the engineering prototype for the first cabinet-style record players of the 1890s.

Every year, the Christmas LPs came out after Thanksgiving, and this was my favorite. For the first several years, I managed not to destroy the cover, so I was able to recall its design. What stuck most in my memory was a golden, trumpet-playing, winged cherub, which hung in the upper right-hand corner of the photo. You can see the cover, and bid on a sealed copy of the LP, here.

After the LP lost the valiant battle to survive in the Great Vinyl Meltdown of 1972, every Christmas involved nostalgia for the family gatherings, for the wreath covered in Brach’s butterscotch candies that one of my cousins always made up for us, for my mom, and for that album. The song selection, which included tunes I have never heard elsewhere, the idea of very old technology creating new Christmas traditions in an era that gave us a lot of the traditions we now follow blindly, and the simple beauty of the song arrangements, all worked to make this a great album and a great memory.

And so, I met with a staggering surprise one day in the mid-1980s when I was walking through College Mall in Bloomington, Indiana. There, in the Christmas-music bin, sat the LP. As soon as I caught my breath, I grabbed the album and bought it. I went straight home and played it. My then-spouse probably had not seen anything like caithiseach transfixed, staring at the stereo. The rush to reissue music had not started, or perhaps I could say it started with this LP.

The following year, probably 1987, I found the album again on CD, with the cover smaller but intact. Had I seen the CD first, then the LP, I have no doubt that this would have been one of the few times that I would have bought the LP anyway. The whole package deserves the full-sized treatment.

After I got the CD, it seems that someone else in Bloomington got it, too: one of the radio stations used one of the songs in a number of commercials for a couple of Christmas seasons. Whatever. I was able to hear the music and smile at the memories, rather than be annoyed at the commercialization of the recording.

I am bringing you two recordings, one a song I’ve not heard elsewhere, “Monastery Bells,” the song I had most strongly associated with the album in the 14 years I did not have a copy. The other, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” displays the dynamic range of the 19th-century Regina music box to its best advantage.

I was pleased to learn a couple of years ago that someone is putting out tabletop music boxes similar to the old ones. They use flexible but durable plastic platters, interchangeable so you can hear a variety of songs. I think the sound is electronic rather than mechanical, but I won’t be able to confirm that until I visit my dad in a few days. A search is not showing me a model similar to the one his wife has. I won’t bother to bring up the subject again, but you can ask what I learned, sometime around the end of the year.

Next time, I’ll wrap up Christmas with a tale of the year I played DJ for the entire neighborhood. Then, post-Christmas, I’ll bring in a couple of odds and ends, and on the 31st is the Great Vinyl Countdown. The results are getting weird, so you need to vote!

Monastery Bells

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

L'affaire Santa

2008-12-16T21:54:00.000-06:00

Have you voted yet for your favorite songs from the 2008 blogging year? Don’t let others vote out your favorites! Here's what you need to do about it.

When I wrote last February about my discovery of ten-inch 78-rpm records, I mentioned that I learned how Columbia 78s were constructed when one of my two Jimmy Boyd 78s broke. I didn’t talk about who Jimmy Boyd was at the time, because I had scheduled a discussion of him for today. The 78 that broke? “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” (Columbia 39871).

Sure, you know the song. John Mellencamp did a ragin’ Cajun version of it. The Ronettes recorded a Spectorized version. Darn near everyone who has coughed up a Christmas album has recorded this evergreen. Spike Jones took it into the Top Ten, and Molly Bee squeaked into the Top Twenty, both in 1953. The 4 Seasons took it onto the Christmas chart in 1964. That’s it for chart action, except for thirteen-year-old Jimmy Boyd, who enjoyed two weeks at #1 in 1952 with this top-notch example of what my friend Seana’s father called “Christmas schlock.”

Never mind that Mr. G., Seana’s father, called “Silver Bells” and “Winter Wonderland” Christmas schlock as well. I love “Silver Bells,” partly because we sang it for our Christmas show when I was in the fourth-grade choir. I am nostalgic enough about that one that I found the original sheet music and took the time to arrange my own version on my keyboard. And as for “Winter Wonderland,” the absence of that song from Christmas would mean no Annie Lennox version, so forget deleting that one.

But “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” doesn’t strike me as the greatest stroke of genius ever to leak from Tommie Connor’s pen, nor was its sequel, “I Saw Mommy Do the Mambo with You Know Who.” Or “Binky Bonky the Old Gray Donkey.” Or even “The Biggest Aspidastra in the World,” which is amusing. No, I would have to give the most credit to Tommie’s rather large corpus of Ireland-related songs, but there’s some bias there.

If you haven’t heard Jimmy Boyd’s debut version of this song, you have the chance to do so now. Jimmy sounds young enough to believe that Santa and Mom are smooching, though by age thirteen he should be expressing concern about Mom’s infidelity, or at least he should be shocked into silence by the fact that Santa is really and truly in his house. Instead, he’s simply amused and wishes Dad could check out the spectacle. Never mind that Santa might go to the Great Sleigh in the Sky if Dad caught him.

Five-year-old caithiseach wasn’t as uptight about this song as I am now, but I still preferred the B-side, “Thumbelina,” to this one. Something I notice now is the terribly awkward chord progression starting through this part: “Oh what a laugh it would have been/If Daddy had only seen/Mommy kissing Santa Claus last night.” One time, I heard a recording where someone had revamped the progression and made it sound listenable (of course, I don’t know who did that one), but I wince every time I hear most versions.

Jimmy Boyd is, I would say, an acquired taste. But in 1952, he was all that. He was from Mississippi, but his family moved to California when he was two. When Jimmy was seven, his brother talked a country dance band into letting Jimmy sing and show off his guitar work. The crowd went nuts. He was given a weekly gig at $50 a pop, 200 times what his father had made each day when he was a Mississippi cotton-picker. Music fans of all ages went nuts over Jimmy.

When he recorded today’s song, he sold 2.5 million copies in the week it was released. He was as big as Miley, and, undoubtedly, as talented as any kid star of any time. Ed Sullivan loved him, had him on five times, and bumped adult guests to make room for Jimmy. Jimmy recorded hit duets with Frankie Laine and Rosemary Clooney. He wound up working with an incredible number of music legends, most of whom came to him for the privilege.

Then he did television, and films, and Broadway, and he married Yvonne Craig. Dang. All that, and a song (today’s hit) that was banned in Boston. They thought little Jimmy had brought sex into Christmas—what about the fact that the song featured a fictional character who detracted from the main message of Christmas? Hmm.

So, Jimmy has had quite the career. All told, he has sold sixty million records. Now, he can sell CDs, because The Best of Jimmy Boyd is available via Collectables Records. The collection doesn’t include “Thumbelina” or the other two sides I had on 78, but you can’t have everything.

A quick aside: Thanks to the West Virginia Surf Report, I discovered the perfect Christmas present for YOU. It’s a website that allows you to take any YouTube video, paste in the video ID (beginning after v=), and the site will show the video and attach to it the Benny Hill version of “Yakety Sax.” I could not find anything more bizarre to share with you than the Benny Hillifier. It’s much fun. Go here: http://james.nerdiphythesoul.com/bennyhillifier/. Feel free to regift this one.

The next two posts will be about songs I owned on LPs when I was a kid. For Saturday, I’ll bring you a song I remembered primarily because of an angel on the LP cover. See you then, and don’t forget to vote in the Great Vinyl Countdown.

Jimmy Boyd, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

The Price of Obesity

2008-12-12T22:49:00.000-06:00

Many of us have struggled with weight issues. My struggle was different from most. I overworked myself for a stretch of time during graduate school and found myself down to 102 pounds (46.5 kg or 7 stone, 4 pounds). When I realized that was not enough weight, the school dietitian put me on a 3,000-calorie diet. It was a lot of work eating all that food: breakfast consisted of a serving of oatmeal with wheat germ on it, milk and sugar; a banana; a serving of orange juice; an egg fried in butter with buttered toast; two waffles with butter and syrup; a serving of bacon, and fried potatoes. And a glass of milk with Carnation Instant Breakfast in it.

It took me a long time to eat those breakfasts, but they paid off, in conjunction with thousand-calorie lunches and dinners. In the four months I was on the 3,000-calorie diet, I gained a pound a week. But then I hit a plateau, and I dropped off the diet. But I did weigh 117 pounds. That was good, because with my body fat as low as it was, I was in greater immediate danger of organ failure than someone who was 100 pounds overweight.

Santa Claus seems to have the opposite problem. Although he is portrayed in the Rudolph special as being thin until he stocks up on fatty foods in late December, I have yet to see a photo of Santa in which he doesn’t have a pretty good heft to him.

Even so, it’s not kind of Augie Ríos to get in Santa’s face and call him ol’ Fatso, as he does in his other 1958 Christmas classic, “Ol’ Fatso” (Metro K20010). While many people have heard the A-side of this 45, in part because (as I neglected to mention on Wednesday) it reached #47 on the Hot 100, “Ol’ Fatso” didn’t chart, and it has not gotten the reissue attention that “¿Dónde está Santa Claus?” has.

That could be because Augie calls Santa a name and tells him to get his reindeer off the roof of Augie’s house. Augie seems to think that his presents appear out of nowhere, rather than from their true source, Santa. As a result, Augie gets no gifts the following year. He sings the song to let us know how badly he messed up. I, for one, am glad for the message, which prevents me from becoming too smug this time of year.

Though Augie paid the price for calling Santa fat, the experience of another kid shows that Augie’s description wasn’t inaccurate, just unkind. For, as Jeff Barry relates in a tune he composed with Artie Resnick in 1962, Santa was chubby enough to get stuck in his chimney. The result is that a whole bunch of toys aren’t going to get delivered. Jeff has to unload them on the neighbors, which can earn a kid great, though perhaps transient, popularity. The problem is that Santa will have to pay everyone overtime and buy the raw materials to remake all the presents for the kids who got stiffed because of Santa’s paunch.

That, my friends, is the true price of obesity.

Jeff’s version of the song is the unreleased demo, which you may not have heard before. Wendy Burton released the song on Columbia 42624 in 1962. That recording did not chart.

The writers of these tunes have been featured before. Jeff Barry, of course, is Jeff Barry, and Artie Resnick is one of his early mentors, whose credits include “Good Lovin’” (the Young Rascals), “Quick Joey Small” (Kasenetz blah blah) and, oh, “Under the Boardwalk” (Drifters).

“Ol’ Fatso” was the product of Gordon Irving, whose work I featured in the third post of the blog: “Mama from the Train.” Irving wrote a couple of other tunes for Patti Page, and he wrote the unforgettable “Unforgettable.”

Just so you know, “Ol’ Fatso” is the final childhood 45 I am sharing with you this year. The rest of the 2008 songs include one 78, a pair of childhood album cuts, and a single that was released in 1980. While I have new topics in the works for 2009, no music I discuss is going to be as dear to me as the songs I owned, then lost and recovered or salvaged at the time of the Great Vinyl Meltdown in 1972. On December 27, I’m going to run by you some descriptions of songs I can almost remember, in hopes that some will be part of your experience, and I can get them back into mine.

Since I discovered the WLS year-end countdowns around 1971, as well as the American Top 40 year-end gig, I have found such events worthy of my time. This year, I am going to do something similar on a far smaller scale.

I am going to list in a separate post all of the songs I have featured on the blog so far in 2008. (See below.) I request that you vote for your ten favorites, in order. Then, on December 31, which happens to be a Blogging Wednesday, I’ll post the resulting Top Ten for the blog year. If you must, leave your votes as a comment, but I would prefer that you vote secretly by email to me at caithiseach, so as not to influence others with your wise choices. Vote by December 22 to ensure inclusion of your opinions.

I will repost those ten songs on December 31. In the meantime, if you want to vote but missed some of the songs, let me know which ones you want to hear, and I’ll reattach old links on an as-needed basis.

I have composed a lot of countdowns over the years, but this one will actually have some lasting meaning to me, so I hope you’ll take a few minutes to work out your vote.

And while you wait for New Year’s Eve, enjoy whatever it is you eat this time of year. December is for socializing over food. February is for dieting.

Wednesday, I’ll bring you a child star of the 1950s who wouldn’t have gotten far today, amid the Mileys and Britneys. See you then!

Augie Ríos, Ol’ Fatso

Jeff Barry, Seventeen Million Bicycles

SONG LIST FOR COUNTDOWN IS BELOW THIS POST

Great Vinyl Countdown!

2008-12-12T22:47:00.000-06:00

Email caithiseach your ten favorites from his 2008 Great Vinyl Meltdown, in order. I’ll calculate the totals and blog about the Top Ten in a New Year’s Eve countdown. Voting deadline: December 22. If you don’t remember a song, email me so I can update the link for you.

The Gypsy Rover
Land of Beauty
Mama from the Train
People Sure Act Funny
Mystery 45 A
Mystery 45 B
Midnight Sun
Moon in the Afternoon
Snow Train
When the Sun Goes Down
Jealous
You Can’t Fool an Angel
Don’t Be Cruel (Masaru Wada recording)
Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer
Washington Square
Blue Monday
Walking to New Orleans
Why Wait
Patricia
Uncle Tom Got Caught
Wishful Thinking
That Background Sound
Now It’s All Over
General of Broken Hearts
If It Takes a Fool
La Dee Dah (Ha Ha Ha)
You Don’t Wanna Hurt Me
Face from Outer Space
Lonely Lips
Traps
My Dad
Shake Me I Rattle
Hello Trouble
Can't Hang Up the Phone
Hello Trouble
Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh
Gee (Roomates (sic))
Answer Me, My Love
Please Love Me Forever (Cathy Jean)
Gee (Pixies Three)
After the Party
Genie in the Bottle
Satellite Sadie
Baby I Love You (Andy Kim)
Be My Baby (Andy Kim)
Sugar, Sugar
Jingle Jangle
A Summer Prayer for Peace
Simple Steps
Ala Carte
Peter and the Wolf (Sterling Holloway)
Monster Shindig
76 Trombones
Gary, Indiana
Close the Door Gently
Hello, Dolly!
Born to Be with You
Skin Divin’
(Her Name Is) Toni
Since Gary Went in the Navy
What I Did This Summer
Do You Know What Time It Is
A Boy with a Dream
He Don’t Need You Like I Do
Girl of My Best Friend
Quiet!
Hey, Baby
Whisper to Me
Funny Bone
Batman (Jan & Dean)
Batman Theme (Neal Hefti)
Montego Bay
Lay a Little Lovin’ on Me
Under the Boardwalk (Mellencamp)
Tighter, Tighter
Are You Ready?
How Do You Do?
Back When My Hair Was Short
Beans in My Ears
Go Charley Go
Reason for Love
Tutti Frutti (Art Mooney)
C’est toi que j’aime
You Mostest Girl
Uh Oh
The Wheel
Golden Ruby Blue
Sweet Little Baby I Care
Have You Had a Change of Heart
Mickey’s Monkey
My Little Marie
Motorcycle
I Don’t Believe Them
Are You Trying to Tell Me Somethin’
(The Land of) Bobby Beeble
Slowly He Sank into the Sea
Experiment in Terror
Old Boris
Old Rivers
Laughing Over My Grave
Funny Way of Laughin’
A Boy in Buckskin
Pony Boy
Where Do You Work-A John
Big Rock Candy Mountain
Rivalry
I Found Love with You
Super-Cali-Fragil-Istic-Expi-Ali-Docious
Glenn & Kennedy
Siamese Cat Song
I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do
No Privacy
Twinkle Toes
Happy Xmas
¿Dónde está Santa Claus?
Ol’ Fatso
Seventeen Million Bicycles

Where the Heck Is Santa Claus?

2008-12-09T23:05:00.000-06:00

When you’re two years old, and you know that Spanish has upside-down question marks, you clearly have been exposed to the vast world community. Unless you are a native speaker of Spanish, of course. I sure wasn’t.

One of my early musical gifts from my mom was a 45 with a blue-and-silver label, with a lion’s head on it. I can’t remember a time when the single didn’t have a crack running through it, but it was one of those marvelous cracks that behave well enough to let you play the 45, if you get the two edges of the crack even enough.

Even though the song was about Santa Claus, I didn’t reserve this one just for Christmas. Oh, no, I cranked this little rocker whenever I was in the mood for some Latin vibes. (This was before I got my 78 of “Why Wait” by Pérez Prado y su Orquesta.)

The record had an ¿ on the label because the title of the song was a question, and it was asked in Spanish. Awesome, ¿no? I dug listening to this little kid ask his mamacita where Santa was. I played the record bunches of times, babying that crack for ten years. Then the sun took my ¿ away with the rest of the vinyl-styrene lump that used to be my record collection.

Though I forgot some of the records (and I’ll try to elicit your help with a few at year’s end), I never forgot this one. I started doing searches for “¿Dónde está Santa Claus?” on CDnow, and there I found a version completely in Spanish by a young lady named Tatiana. That was not what I sought. My version was bilingual, sung by a little boy with a gravelly voice.

Then, one day, holy cow, CDnow had a Christmas compilation CD that included the version I needed. I bought myself that CD for Christmas. And research showed me that the single was by Augie Ríos, Metro K20010, from 1958. Then began the search for that blue-labeled original, preferably sans crack. (How many more readers will I get if I put “crack” in the keywords?)

Sure enough, I found the single. And the guy who was selling it kindly offered me a better-sounding DJ copy for less money. Since I was after authenticity, I did what you would expect: I bought them both. Metro Records is, of course, a subsidiary of MGM. The label looks a lot more slapped-together than those of such MGM artists as Connie Francis. I don’t care. The record is back where it belongs.

From my current perspective as a near-native speaker of Spanish, which I began to learn in earnest in 1976, I can see that the label would have had Spanish speakers shaking their heads at the silly gringos. While the words “dónde” and “está” have accent marks over the correct vowels (making the typists more accurate than my students), the marks face the wrong way, which makes me think that Metro’s French Music Department lent someone out to do the typesetting. The DJ copy has no accent marks and is missing the ¿. Sigh.

I won’t even go into how patronizing it sounds to hear about Santa clacking his castanets and calling his reindeer Pancho and Pedro. I still dig the song. And you will as well, in a couple of minutes, if you read fast.

Augie Ríos appeared on Broadway as a child actor, and he’s on IMDB as having appeared in an episode of the TV series Naked City. He recorded some other singles, according to this tasty bio (scroll down). The song was written by Gordon Parker, Al Greiner and George Scheck. Parker wrote some TV themes, and Greiner co-wrote Parker’s non-TV titles, as did Scheck. Scheck’s name is attached to some really old Italian numbers as well, which makes me wonder.

That’s all I have on this song, other than to say: Enjoy it! It comes back every year for a reason. I don’t mind that I don’t hear the periodic click of the needle passing over the crack on my original 45; the smooth CD transfer from the original tapes is heart-warming and—

AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

Today, I heard “Carol of the Bells” on the radio, and I realized how much I miss the André Champagne commercial. I first heard it in 1971. I know it was 1971, because my cousin was housesitting for friends, and she invited me and Irish Sister over for a few days, shortly after SWAT Team Brother was born. That was the weekend the house was burglarized, and that was cool.

I knew it was The Season every year from then on when the ting of glasses came accompanied by this Christmas tune I did not know by name, and then came the quavery voice of the young lady narrator, a voice I learned to like based on familiarity. And then, one year in the late 1980s, the commercial simply did not come on. I have been flippant in this post, but I really did feel a sense of loss with the removal of this commercial.

I have the first version on my hard drive, but I don’t know if it can be viewed if I upload it, so here’s the second version, with Cold Duck added to the vast array of André products. You can still buy it, but remember, at $6 a bottle, you are not getting Dom.

Saturday, the flip of Augie’s single, about some fat guy. And why not—a song about the ramifications of said fat guy’s rotundity. Cheers!

Augie Ríos, ¿Dónde está Santa Claus?

A Post That Should Be Unnecessary

2008-12-08T02:07:00.000-06:00

In the 1970s, Top 40 radio from Chicago was my sole source of new music. One positive thing about Chicago Top 40 was that, if a crummy song came on WLS, I could switch to WCFL, and in a pinch there was Oldies WIND and even Country WMAQ.

Another positive about the tight rotations of Top “40” was that, after awhile, I could learn to like songs I had dismissed at first. One such song was “Lady” by Styx; I had to get used to Dennis DeYoung’s voice. Another was “Bad Time” by Grand Funk; I heard the repetitive chorus a few times before I heard the intro and verse melody.

Two others that took time to cook in my head were “Fame” and “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” I wasn’t a Bowie fan until then, and the wocka-wocka guitar of the latter song made my ears hurt. Not even the sax could overcome that and the not-so-fun vocal collaboration of Lennon and whoever was singing the harmony.

What those two song have in common, of course, is John Lennon, who was involved as writer and vocalist on both. I own those two 45s now. I learned to love the songs before they disappeared from the record stores.

I should not have to write this post because, as is the case with John F. Kennedy, Lennon’s birthday, October 9, should be the significant date we commemorate. Had he lived out his lifespan, the anniversary of his death would someday be of smaller note, and October 9 would matter more.

But it was seen to that Lennon would not be allowed to continue his artistic trajectory, that his wee son Sean would have to grow up fatherless, and that his wife would be a widow for more than a quarter of a century. It’s not fair, to him, or to us.

On December 8, 1980, I was in my third year at university. It was a Monday night, near the end of the semester. Rather than studying or sleeping, I was working. I had a job making pizzas for a national chain, and we were fairly busy that evening, thanks to hungry students who were finally cracking the books. Soon thereafter, the owner of the company would ban radios in his stores, because he called one and heard heavy metal blasting. But we could listen to the radio legitimately on December 8, 1980.

And so it was that, while I was tossing slices of pepperoni onto a pizza, the announcer on the Indianapolis rock station we always listened to, WFBQ, stopped the music and told us that John Lennon had been assassinated. It was shortly after 11pm. My boss, Keith, looked at me, his mouth open. I don’t know what I looked like. I remember thinking that this was a moment that we would mark as history. I feel guilty for not recognizing immediately all of the ramifications, all of the loss entailed in this act.

We left the radio on, in hopes of hearing more news. There really was nothing more to say. John was dead. Not quite instantly, which is awful. It had to cross his mind that he had said goodbye to his son and gone to work, and now he wasn’t coming home.

When we closed the shop, I went back to my dorm. My roommate, Ray, was asleep. On nights when there was big news to share, I woke him. In the early hours of December 9, he woke up enough to hear that John Lennon had died.

The next morning, I was awake and moving around when he sat up in bed, looking confused. He asked if I had told him anything the night before. I confirmed that I had, and a look that I remembered from the night before, at work, crossed his face. We were all stunned. Everyone in the dorm, in classes, at work. We had all been glad to hear John Lennon’s voice on the radio again, especially in a song as great as “(Just Like) Starting Over,” which had debuted in the Top 40 on November 1. Now, he would disappear again.

But he has not disappeared. I don’t have to tell you that. I’m glad we cherish him as he deserves. I know this Monday post will eat into the reading of my Saturday post, but I don’t care.

I was going to tack up “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” to accompany this piece, but since I have started a series of posts about nontraditional Christmas songs, it occurs to me that Lennon came up with a fine one of his own. Happy Christmas to you, John, and thanks for this song.

I won’t leave it up long, as you really should buy this if you don’t own it. Back to scheduled programming on Wednesday. Thanks for reading.

John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir, Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

The Next Big Reindeer Craze

2008-12-06T00:07:00.000-06:00

As an indication of how this week has gone, let me tell you that, on Wednesday evening, I was walking toward my car in the parking lot of my apartment complex. The pavement was completely dry. Except, of course, for a saucer-sized spot of hard ice from a beverage that had been poured onto the asphalt. I skidded on it, hyperextended my knee, twisted my ankle, and landed on my hip. The good news: only one leg was involved. The bad news: that was the good news for the week.

I will contrast that story with the fact that, no matter how awful the economy is or how bleak a particular year may seem, I always have good memories of Christmas celebrations. Many people hate Christmas because they have to gather with people they don’t like, or they feel obligated to buy presents they can’t afford. I understand the pressures; I almost bailed on a Christmas event where my stepmom made me drive to the store six times in three hours for things she had forgotten she needed.

I am, therefore, grateful that my first seven Christmases were so darn good. I hope to capture some Super 8mm footage of those years and YouTube it so I can link to it on this blog. We’ll see how that goes.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to learn that some of my best Christmas memories involve music. I already posted audio of 1963, when I got an upgrade in audio equipment, as well as a bunch o’records. In 1965, Uncle Tom came over, and soon I heard a record playing. I ran to the record player, and it wasn’t on. I ran to the source of the sound, and I found a suitcase-sized Magnavox stereo with detachable speakers and an automatic Garrard record changer. Stereo. I had never heard stereo up close until then.

Most of my Christmas music was on LPs, and all of those LPs and every Christmas-themed 45 I owned succumbed to the Great Vinyl Meltdown. I owned a Bravo Records mono LP of Christmas music, a 20th Century Fox LP that included my favorite version of “Away in a Manger,” and two LPs that will get their due before Santa arrives this year.

I have managed to retrieve three recordings of Christmas-themed songs that I owned on 45 or 78. One of them was the flip side of Lennie LaCour’s “No Privacy.” At this time of year, three-year-old caithiseach was playing “Twinkle Toes (The Christmas Cha Cha)” (Lucky Four 1001) on a fairly regular basis.

Considering that one famous artist has rendered the term Amer***n P*e unusable by anyone but himself without a license, it strikes me as odd that Lennie LaCour could write and record a song that adds to the Rudolph mythos. This recording predates the 1964 Burl Ives television special, but it still plays off the Johnny Marks composition enough to be considered a derivative work for copyright purposes. I’m not going to dig to discover any possible lawsuits or settlements; I suspect that Twinkle Toes flew so far under the Reindar that Marks never learned of its existence.

The premise of the story is that Rudolph hooked up with Vixen, and the nose light that caused Rudolph so much childhood grief somehow showed up in Twinkle Toes’s hooves. Santa “gets more light from Twinkle Toes,” so the kid comes in handy on Christmas Eve.

I said last time that I remembered the name of the Lucky Four label, as well as this title, “Twinkle Toes.” I didn’t connect them until I searched for both of them and found intersecting links. I couldn’t remember the tune to “Twinkle Toes” until I put the 45 on, but after the first two guitar notes, the whole memory returned. I love it when that happens.

I discovered an odd thing about that purchase today. At Terry Gordon's Lennie LaCour page, there is a link to a label scan of “No Privacy.” “Twinkle Toes” is not scanned there, so I pulled out my 45 today. The “No Privacy” side looked familiar, so I compared it to the scan online. Sure enough, there is a handwritten “10” and a bit of tape adhesive on both the scan and the 45 I own. So, it seems that Udo Frank scanned the label, then either sold me the 45 by mail or unloaded it on a dealer. Either way, I own THE official copy of Lucky Four 1001.

I also learned more about Lennie LaCour. I said on Wednesday that he seemed to have let his compositions lapse with BMI. I was wrong. Wrong, I tell you! Despite having entered his name under various permutations, I gave up too soon. A BMI search for “Twinkle Toes” unearthed 31 titles, and I didn’t catch his version. Today, I looked up his co-writer for “Twinkle Toes,” Carrie Fraley, and it all became clear. Lennie is now an ASCAP writer, it seems (though I searched for him there as well), but his early material is registered with BMI. Carrie Fraley is still a BMI-listed writer, and she has 55 titles to her credit, including several more with Lennie. I couldn’t find any details on her.

I forgot to mention last time that Lennie’s big break came when he won a jingle contest for Orange Crush, the inimitable orange soda that I hereby endorse free of charge. Get yours at Kmart or selected Walmarts or, if you never moved out of Indiana, darn near any store in the state. Orange Crush distributed Lennie’s debut 78, “Rock N Roll Romance,” in 1955. Carrie Fraley co-wrote that tune, so their collaboration lasted a number of years.

Now that I have filled in that gap, it’s onward from the early 1960s. Once Lucky Four stopped being lucky for Lennie, he did what every Louisiana-to-Chicago music mogul does: he went to Milwaukee. There, he ran the labels Dynamic Sound and Magic Touch. He produced the Ethics, later known as the Invasion, and Attila and the Huns, whom Lennie renamed as Filet of Soul. Lennie got Chess records interested in the band, and when Chess didn’t want to release the album he had produced, Lennie bought the rights and released the album himself. The entire intriguing story is here.

Lennie did disco in the 1970s, and at some point in the 1970s he started billing himself as King Creole. He seems to have been on the trailing edge of most of the trends for which he wrote novelty tunes, but he’s getting a decent amount of respect these days.

Why? Check it out: Night Train International (Tuff City) just released (November 2008!) a 25-track CD compilation of Lennie’s work, Walkin’ the Bullfrog (Night Train 7160). You can find “No Privacy” and “Twinkle Toes” there. Lennie, as Lenny, contributed to the liner notes. At 76, he’s still going strong. I know what I’m getting myself for Christmas. If you like the 45 I put up here at all, you should make Lennie’s year by buying the CD as well.

So, that’s Lennie. He and I go back to 1962, though he doesn’t know it. I should write to him to tell him that I made a fool of myself when the family was talking about Rudolph and the other reindeer, and I brought up Twinkle Toes. “Who?” everyone asked. Oh, well.

I’m going to make a special post for Monday, then it’s back to business as usual with another oddball Christmas 45 I lost to the sun. See you Monday and Wednesday!

Lennie LaCour, Twinkle Toes

A Lucky Find?

2008-12-02T22:39:00.000-06:00

When I began last October to write posts for this blog year, I didn’t know what would happen. Would I get tired of digging around for info on obscure artists and give up mid-year? (Answer: No.) Would I have so few readers that I would feel stupid for continuing? (Answer: I have enough readers that I don’t feel embarrassed, so thanks.) Would I stick to the premise or the schedule of songs I had set for myself? (Answer: Yes.)

And that leads me to this final month of caithiseach’s childhood 45s. As of now, it looks as if readers are comfortable with a couple of new directions for when I run out of home-grown vinyl. I have settled on these topics for 2009: ROM (Really Old Music, like Paul Whiteman and Billy Murray) for some Wednesdays, alternating with Women You Don’t Know on the others; Saturdays will recap the Billboard charts 1955-1959, which is a much more complex set of data than the Joel Whitburn books would indicate.

If you want to make a belated pitch for some of the other topics I offered a couple of months ago, I’ll consider rotating over three Wednesdays, but I intend to hit all of those topics eventually.

I am reflecting on where I’ve been and where I’m going because, from here on, every 45 is either the last or the almost-last of its kind. Today, we’re looking at the next-to-last 45 that I have (so far) recovered after losing it to the Great Vinyl Meltdown. This is a single I remembered from the day of the Meltdown on; I didn’t have to burrow through memories to find the label image. However, I remembered the label in one part of my brain, and I remembered the title of Saturday’s song in another, and it took an internet search to match the title to the label.

A couple of times this year, I noted that very common names (Michael Allen, Johnny Cooper) made research difficult. Also, having a mildly unusual name and no success (Davi) could lead to a big zero in search-engine hits. Today’s guy, by my reckoning, should have been discernible by name (Lennie or Lenny LaCour), though a listen to his 45 would make me wonder if people talked about him much.

It was gratifying, then, to learn that there were plenty of pages that refer to Lennie, gratifying both for research purposes and because he seems like an okay guy who deserves a bit of a nod from all of us. So, here goes.

My Uncle Tom would have brought me “No Privacy” by Lennie LaCour (Lucky Four 1001) in the first stack or two of cutout 45s I ever received. Lucky Four was a Chicago label, and I can get from my childhood house to the Chicago city limits in half an hour, so it didn’t take three years for this March, 1961 release to wend its way to the Big Top department store in Merrillville, Indiana. I owned the 45 for ten years, and I played the B-side with fair regularity at certain times of the year. “No Privacy” was a bouncy rocker in the caithiseach wheelhouse, but it faced a lot of competition and stayed in the lower rungs of the caithiseach playlist.

Then, it disappeared from the world in 1972. Rather, it disappeared from the above-ground world; I’m sure it’s sitting deep in a landfill, where in a thousand years it will be excavated, and the archaeologists will wonder what kind of complex device was used to play a piece of vinyl shaped like a Möbius strip.

The Lucky Four single, however, did not disappear from my mind. The label had four, um, lucky symbols: a wishbone, a horseshoe, a rabbit’s foot and a four-leaf clover. The label is tasteful, with a splash of red to set it apart from all those black labels. “No Privacy” didn’t stick with me; the title of the B-side did, and I’ll get to that Saturday.

“No Privacy” didn’t stick with listeners, either, despite a mention in Billboard, as Terry Gordon indicates. Lennie believed in the recording, it seems, as he jumped right back on that particular horse and released Lucky Four 1002 as “No Privacy” plus different B-side and different artist name. For 1002, from April, 1961, Lennie billed himself as the Big Rocker. (The Big Bopper was not long enough deceased to recycle that name.)

How did Lennie gain enough pull to get his single remarketed and himself renamed? Well, he founded the label. I think that’s pretty cool, by the way. I have wanted to found a record label for maybe thirty years, and I still haven’t gotten around to doing it.

Lennie actually has had a very interesting career as an artist and mini-mogul. I’ll give you some of the history today, and some Saturday.

Born in 1932 in Bayou Bredelle, Louisiana, Lennie wandered up to Chicago, where he recorded four singles in 1957, three for Academy, and one for Spin. He did a good portion of his own songwriting from the start. “No Privacy,” however, was a J. Richard-J. Burgess composition for which Lennie got some of the publishing. A fairly lengthy search produced no further information on these two songwriters. Lennie himself seems to have let his BMI compositions go to Database Heaven, which surprises me, considering his continuing role in music.

After some more Lucky Four releases, three as artist and as many as fifteen as owner/producer, Lennie moved on to Milwaukee to do more production work and songwriting. I’ll bring that part of his story to you for Saturday. Now, the song itself:

“No Privacy” is perhaps not the song one would lead with in an attempt to sell you on Lennie LaCour. Snippets of other material present him in a better light, but this is what I have available to work with, and it’s what I owned in 1962.

There are a couple of points to ponder about “No Privacy.” Messrs. Richard and Burgess essentially wrote new lyrics to the tune of “Little Brown Jug.” Granted, “Little Brown Jug” is a traditional tune, so there was no infringement that I can see, but then there’s the lyrics . . .

“No Privacy” is, as you may deduce, a tale of two lovers who can’t get any alone time. In that sense, it fits in the long line of such songs that eventually leads to Tiffany singing “I Think We’re Alone Now.” That’s fine. But it’s clear from Lennie’s voice that he’s not seventeen, or even nineteen. Ricky Nelson should have been singing this song, not a guy who sounds every bit the 29-year-old he is. Lennie is suitably expressive, and the song is fun in some ways, both intentional and unintentional, but when the 29-year-old protagonist is dodging the girl’s “old man,” we’re talking about an “old man” who is not old enough to be the singer’s father. Unless the girl is also 29, in which case, I think, she should move into an apartment of her own.

This guy and girl like sodas and shakes; she has brothers at home; her mother comes into the room to do some dusting; her old man “don’t nothin’ miss.” Someday, they’re “gonna live alone.” But he’s 29!

The song sports a very clean, perky guitar break that makes the song for me. I’m guessing that it’s Lennie playing it. In fact, Lennie put together a far better band than most tiny labels do. No out-of-tune sax like on “Motorcyle,” which came from Amy, a label that had some hits. You may not have as much trouble as I do with the lyrical premise; I’ve said before that I don’t suspend disbelief as easily as some, like when thunder and lightning occur together, in the distance, in movies.

I have to note that, just as with other singles that flopped, came to me, melted and reappeared via vinyl salesmen in this decade, I greeted the return of Lucky Four 1001 with great joy. If I could open my head with a can opener and have someone I trust peer in and read all the little memories of 45s I can’t remember, so I could look for them online, I would do it. 45s are just that much fun, and I just wish I had been smart enough to keep mine out of the sun in 1972.

For Saturday, expect the B-side of “No Privacy” and, with it, the ushering-in of a season you should have seen coming after I spent two weeks counting down to Halloween. See you on the flip side!

Lennie LaCour, No Privacy

Art for Art’s Sake Vs. Utilitarianism

2008-11-29T02:13:00.000-06:00

This post is going to touch on a concept I learned in graduate school, but don’t let that scare you away. It’s about music, and I won’t test you on the material. I won’t even put you to sleep.

I mentioned an “innovation” for this post, but I am starting the writing an hour after I wanted to upload the post, so screw innovation. I’ll get my point across the usual way, if you’re kind enough to follow the in-text music links at the appropriate moment.

What I want to bring up is the times that music, usually a great bonding material, creates isolation. Music bonds people instantly when, for example, someone walks through a store that is part of the exclusive selling chain for the new AC-DC album, and he picks up a copy of Black Ice just as someone wearing a ratty AC-DC t-shirt walks by. T-Shirt Guy nods knowingly at CD-Holding Guy. What T-Shirt Guy doesn’t know is that CD-Holding Guy, who is now writing a blog post about the moment, had no intention of buying that CD anytime real soon. But I did nod back.

I like almost all music, in the sense that I can find a redeeming quality in almost any track. My students (and I) are amused at my fondness for “Shake That” by Eminem, an artist I dismissed for a decade but now listen to voluntarily. I listen to his work without having given up my affinity for Pérez Prado and Howard Jones. It’s one big all-inclusive music world in caithiseach-land. But not everyone lands as firmly on the fence as I do, and taking a side in the world of musical politics leads to snobbery and even ostracism.

In college, we discussed the trajectories of literary movements, some of which lasted a century. To keep this really short, I’ll note that sometimes people thought art should be ornamental, a way to make life more beautiful, and at other times, people expected art to serve a social purpose. In Latin American Modernism of the late 1800s, the point was to be pretty. By the time César Vallejo came of age, poetry served to educate the masses, give perspective on how life could be better. In the 1990s, an Indiana University professor wrote a paper in which he took Wordsworth to task for not addressing the plight of the homeless. Sheesh.

So it has gone with recorded music, in much more rapid cycles. From the early “frivolous” tunes of the 1890s to serious hymns and patriotic World War I music, to the Charleston, to Depression commentary and patriotic World War II music, to 1950s love songs, to anti-war Vietnam music, to “Playground in My Mind,” and so on. At times, there is a mix of trends and attitudes toward music. I got caught in one such whirlpool in the 1970s. It wasn’t pretty.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that the 45s I owned when I was a toddler were all over the stylistic map. I developed a preference for bouncy, melodic music, but I didn’t limit myself. That broad exposure to music set me up to be completely comfortable with what they were playing in 1976, as you will soon hear: cue the music!

What I am going to say now will make more sense if you cue the music. That minute of music includes snippets of “Sail Along, Silv’ry Moon” by Billy Vaughn and His Orchestra and “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” by Connie Francis. Those songs, and others I owned, put the alto sax and the classic 1-4-5 progression (the guitar in the Francis song) in my comfort zone. They made it very probable that I would take an instant liking to the third song in the clip.

So, on a Sunday morning in early April, 1976, WCFL in Chicago, the “other” Top 40 station in town, suddenly dropped into its rotation the new ABBA single. I heard it ten times in the next three days, then the song disappeared forever. From the first listen, I found “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do” (Atlantic 3310) very pleasing to my musical palate. What I didn’t know was that absolutely everyone else I knew would hate it.

I blame the limitations of AM radio for part of the problem. WLS and WCFL, like many stations of their time, did something they called “compression” when they played songs. Someone at the station would take songs and speed them up a tiny bit, thus saving ten seconds per song, the equivalent of a short song and two extra valuable commercials over the course of an hour. The DJs claimed that compression didn’t change the sound of the song, but I knew better. Listen to this approximation of “I Do” (easily the hardest song title to type, ever) as it came out of the speaker of my clock radio in 1976: Cue the music again! (You can compare that sound file to the one at the end of the blog.)

Compression made most ABBA singles sound as if there were a bit of Swedish Chipmunk in the singers’ DNA, which is unfortunate, as you know if you have heard them sing at the proper speed. In 1976, most of the people I knew were casual enough about music not to notice the pitch difference, so they thought all the artists on the radio sounded a bit odd. It was only the sopranos, however, who really sounded bad. They, and Eddie Holman, who sounded like a lesbian when he sang “Hey There, Lonely Girl” on WLS in 1970.

The other aspect of the “I Do” issue, for my friends, is that they had not been exposed at an early age to Billy Vaughn and Connie Francis. I was able to enjoy all of the ABBA music I heard: rock(ish), Calypso, pseudo-classical, and jazzy stuff. The style of “I Do” was something with which I had no experience: schlager. All Europeans have been exposed to the stuff, via the Eurovision Song Contest and any number of releases by German singers. I didn’t know in 1976 that schlager was to be disdained. I liked the sax, the harmonies, and the structure of “I Do.” And when I finally heard the song in stereo, in a car with a good sound system, in late May, 1976, I fell for the voices and the sax.

Everyone shook their head in disgust and snickered to my face. I just pined for a song I had not bought while the 45 was available. I recreated it in my head, especially in biology class, when I was not intrigued by the lesson.

It was another 45 I let slip by. But one day in Shoals, Indiana, my brother (future Iraq veteran brother) found a copy at the Alco Dime Store. While everyone was up the hill at my Aunt Helen’s house, having a pre-Christmas dinner, I rigged my grandparents’ console stereo so it would play the 45 over and over, and I listened to the song 25 times.

When I went back up the hill, my siblings shook their head in disgust and snickered to my face.

I didn’t let them bother me, because they hassled me in numerous other ways already. But my credibility at school was dropping because I liked this song. What was I to do about that?

I kept liking the song, but I shut up about it. Those people were lost causes, not worthy of attempts at conversion. (I say that to mask the pain.)

This is where “art for art’s sake” comes in. “I Do” is a vase, meant to sit on a corner table, as “Sugar, Sugar” and a number of other Jeff Barry songs are meant to do. There is a place for the utilitarian song, like Edwin Starr’s “War.” But I, unlike a lot of people of my generation, am willing to devote three minutes and fifteen seconds to sonic delight with no redeeming qualities. It does occur to me that some of the people I know who think music must have a purpose are in the habit of plopping themselves down in front of Big Brother XLV or a Minnesota Timberwolves game. And no, friends, I am not referring to anyone who reads this blog.

A complaint (and praise) I have heard about the recordings of ABBA is that they are in control of what they do. In that aspect, I see their work as an attempt to produce pop in a classical form. I don’t mean orchestral rock in the style of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but an attempt to be crisp in the performance of the songs. One such song, “As Good As New,” is documented as having given Madonna the idea for “Papa Don’t Preach.” And one of the most raw songwriters and performers you’ll ever hear, Kurt Cobain, often had ABBA cranking on the tour bus. Go figure.

In such company, I no longer feel bad about enjoying their music. I don’t listen to it to feed my brain, but it covers a multitude of wounds after a long work week. And something few notice is the depth: buried in many of the smooth songs is an instrument that lunges against its tethers. It takes some doing to tease the rage into the open, as in this case: Cue the music yet again!

That somewhat raw guitar is buried in the depths of an ABBA mix. I know where it is, of course, so it sounds obvious to me. I’ll be interested to know if the chord structure and occasional specks of other instruments and voices give it away, or if you are left wondering which song is its source. If you ask, I’ll tell you Wednesday.

So, I have always seen ABBA’s work as art without attempts at pretentiousness. Close to the other end of the spectrum I would place Bob Dylan, whom I respect for reasons that are basically the polar opposites of the reasons I respect ABBA. I thank Bob, for example, for singing in such a way that I always thought I could be a star, too.

The rock critics who grew up listening to the Vietnam-era music of the 1960s then became the judges who trashed ABBA at Rolling Stone and elsewhere. In 1981-82, I read in Rolling Stone something to the effect of “The Visitors is a pretty lousy album, but given the size of their stock portfolios, we should be glad ABBA is making any music at all.” Just Wednesday, I read about the ABBA corpus in a new Rolling Stone LP guide, and the consensus was that the albums were pretty good and worth acquiring. It’s funny what happens when the critics are people who listened to ABBA as kids, rather than Hendrix, the Stones and Dylan.

I don’t feel vindicated, per se, I just feel glad that there are people besides me who can handle art for art’s sake in the musical realm. I just hope they like Dylan and Eminem, too.

A final note: It intrigues me that the original sheet music for “I Do” includes a verse that ABBA never recorded. It’s no more significant than the rest of the lyrics, but it would be fun to hear it. Fun for me, and maybe not for you. Oh, well.

For Wednesday, I’ll bring you one of my childhood 45s, one I recovered after the Great Vinyl Meltdown, one that proves that you should never start a record label just to find a home for your own recordings. See you Wednesday!

ABBA, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do

Pay Us, If You Please

2008-11-25T23:09:00.000-06:00

Amid my collection of cutout 45s, there is a sprinkling of older children’s material on 78 rpm discs. They came from a visit to a house in Gary, where the growing-up children had outgrown their kiddie records. I don’t remember if these people were friends of my mother; they may have been an acquaintance we never visited. I believe money changed hands when the box of 78s came my way.

These weren’t just any old black lacquer discs. Some of them were Golden Records 78s, which had the distinction of being six-inch records with an LP-sized spindle hole (rather than the large hole common to American 45 releases). The Golden Records were, well, golden. I found them very appealing for that reason. Colored records have always caught my eye.

I also received at least three cowboy-related 78s produced by the Record Guild of America. I hope you will look at the scan here, but if you can’t, I’ll tell you that each side of the seven-inch record showed a color drawing with a Western theme, surrounded by an orange band filled with cattle brand markings. The song groove was pressed into clear plastic, it seems, that was glued to the drawing. One side of the record had a larger outer lip, which was subject to chipping, in part because the other side was trimmed to the size of the drawing, and there was not much support for the plastic. The songs were fun to listen to, but I haven’t tried to digitize them yet, so I have not heard them since maybe 1975.

The focus of this post is one particular Golden Record, one that eventually helped pave the way for artists to get more royalties out of movie companies. In case you or I ever sell something to the movies, this is a good precedent.

This disc, Golden Records D214, contained “The Siamese Cat Song” and “Bella Notte.” The cat song fascinated three-year-old caithiseach, because the vocals are so unusual, and because it was the only song I owned then that attempted to sound Asian. My version was sung by Anne Lloyd and Sally Sweetland, accompanied by Mitchell Miller and Orchestra.

These were not the Disney artists who performed the song for the animated film Lady and the Tramp (1955). That was Peggy Lee, singing the roles of both Si and Am.

This is, of course, the same Peggy Lee (1920-2002) who was born Norma Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota. The same one who sang “Fever” better than anyone else. The one who not only sang “The Siamese Cat Song” but co-wrote it with J. Francis Burke, whom I mentioned in January in reference to another of his compositions, “Midnight Sun.”

I wanted to talk about this legendary singer in another context. A bit less than twenty years ago, Peggy got annoyed at the money Disney was raking in from video sales of Lady and the Tramp, mostly because the company wasn’t paying her any royalties for the videos. She got a good lawyer and sued Disney. She won. This victory helped not just her, but many others who had not had the foresight in the 1950s to ask for royalties on video sales when they negotiated their contracts.

Since then, contracts for royalties have become much more vague about the specific media from which a performer or writer will receive royalties. The language these days sounds sort of like “royalties from any means of delivery, real or imagined, including multidimensional holography, on the Earth, the moon, and any other rocky or gaseous bodies in the known Universe, or in any unknown Universes yet to become known.”

Or something like that. And while such language may seem like overkill, you would be stunned at how many people aren’t being paid their cut of a sale simply because the images are imprinted on aluminum instead of celluloid. As much as some actors make, by comparison to the annual income of people who work 2000 hours a year, the idea that a company can stop paying its workers while it still rakes in the bucks strikes me as mildly unfair.

And since it is somewhat contradictory for me to present you with this very cool song free of charge and, thus, free of royalty payments, I will make explicit the always implicit request that you go out and buy the items you want to keep.

Between now and my Saturday post, people in the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving Day. The holiday dates back continuously to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. Although people here now use the holiday to watch American football and eat incredible amounts of food, there is still room for being thankful for what we have. So, enjoy your holiday, and be thankful.

For Saturday, I will talk about what happens when you’re the only person you know who likes a song. I hope to try an innovation on that post while I’m at it. See you Saturday!

Peggy Lee, Siamese Cat Song

Remembering November 22

2008-11-21T23:04:00.000-06:00

In the summer of 1963, when I was alternately groovin’ to “Yakety Sax” at the Dwyer Café and spinning my suddenly vast collection of 45s at home, I began to come down with increasingly frequent cases of tonsillitis. Mine was caused by herpangina, which is NOT related to that other herp, any more than a herpetologist is. I got it in my nose, and it blistered my mouth, and then it just cycled and recycled. My doctor told my parents that the next time my tonsils became infected, he was going to yank them. I remember those days.

I remember the car rides to Shoals, Indiana in the summer of 1963. I remember the amazing Christmas of 1963, when I received the previously mentioned Gaylord and the amazing Stutz Bearcat (photo 1 and photo 2), the first car I ever drove that could be financed, for $4 per month. I remember going to a woman’s house for nursery school, which we now call daycare. She had a lot of books, including some Deputy Dawg books, which were my favorites. Upstairs, in her son’s room, which we were allowed to visit on rare occasions, there was a plastic hand grenade. Fascinating. I liked going there.

Amid all those memories, there’s one I should have had but don’t. It’s not that I was ultra-political when I was three, but when you’re born into an Irish Catholic family that is only two generations into being American, you know your own, and when your own is president, you love him, even if you’re three years old.

I knew the president from the Zenith console television. I knew him from the newspaper. I knew the letters JFK when they appeared in headlines.

And November, 1963 has always been a complete blur to me. I have found it especially odd that today’s date, 45 years into the past, has left no traces alongside the Bearcat and the hand grenade.

Around 2000 or so, I began to pick at that puzzle, and I made a deduction. I knew that those tonsils came out in the fall of 1963. I knew how my first day back at nursery school went: Mom dropped me off as usual, but when she turned to leave, I felt a sudden panic. I remember the sensation vividly. I remember running to her, screaming. I remember the pattern on her coat. I remember the shade of her lipstick. I remember her hairdo. And I remember the shocked look on her face when I begged her to take me home. She did.

The separation anxiety came from my time in the hospital. At one point, my dad was sitting with me in the stark white room. I remember the railing at the foot of the bed. My dad told me he was going to the cafeteria for lunch. He left, and a nurse came in, turned me over and, despite vociferous protests, jabbed a needle in my butt. I told her she would hear about it from my dad. I guess they were trying to keep me from further infection. I didn’t care at that point.

After a period away from nursery school, the teacher called 942-14xx, the phone number we had (which I won’t complete here), and my mom handed me the red phone we had (very trendy; everyone else’s was black), and the teacher proceeded to try to entice me to return to school by inviting me to the Christmas party. My hopeful mother was watching me, and my flat “no” probably made her want to tear out her hair. But she had seen the look on my face. Did she do me a disservice by letting me stay home? I don’t know. But I remember being grateful.

My theory in 2000 was that I was in the hospital when President Kennedy was assassinated. I could find no other explanation for the vacuum in my brain surrounding that event and the funeral. But I had no way of knowing.

Recently I mentioned that my sister found our home movies in the attic in 2004. She also found a box that was full of papers that had been chewed up by nesting mice. She was going to dump it, but she decided to scoop out the nests, and amid all those scraps of paper, there was one big rectangle of paper that the mice had left completely untouched. It was my baby book.

Enter the Log O’Life.

My mother kept meticulous records of my early years. The last entry in the book is from 1967, when she fell prey to the illness that would take her life in 1970. Her early death kept me from learning more about my childhood, but she, and the mice, left the story for me to ready at Christmas, 2004.

I learned that I was put on a special formula that had to be refrigerated. The refrigerator malfunctioned without my parents’ knowledge, and I was given spoiled formula. I was six weeks old, and I spent twelve days in the hospital from that one. That set the tone for my abdomen, and I had to be rehydrated several times over the next three years.

Then came the tonsil drama. My final case of tonsillitis did occur in November, 1963. And between being miserable with tonsillitis and a fever, going into the hospital for treatment prior to surgery, and the tonsillectomy itself on November 25, my agenda was a bit crowded, and I didn’t have time to watch motorcades, news updates, or funerals.

When I exited the hospital, the world was a new, worse place. I do remember that. I don’t know that I had the wherewithal to be distraught enough at the president’s passing for it to have contributed to my existential angst, but all of my relatives were in shock, and I know I picked up those vibes.

Linked to those memories are my visits to Dunkenburger, a small chain located in Gary, Hammond and East Chicago, Indiana, and possibly elsewhere nearby. I remember eating at the Gary restaurant, and I remember asking my dad to drive me by the wreckage when the building burned.

In 1962, Dunkenburger offered as a promotion a 45 produced by Hi-Hat Records, a Gary label that I discussed in these pages in February. I got a copy, which came “compliments of Dunkenburger,” and was not for sale. The 45, BP-153, contained the voices of the “1st American in Orbit, Lt. Col. John H. Glenn, Jr. and Pres. Jack Kennedy.” The president spoke about Col. Glenn after he was recovered from the ocean, and the 45 celebrated the space milestone. The president was still in office when the 45 was released.

I played this 45 sometimes, but a conversation between two adults, with no music involved, got a bit old for two-year-old caithiseach. I remember playing it after the president died. And though the recording must be a matter of public record, you probably have not heard it. Col. Glenn mentions many historic facts, including the lights that greeted him in Australia. The president’s speech comes in about 5:50 into the recording.

As always when I think about this senseless murder, I wonder why the man could not have been allowed to live out his lifespan. Right now, he would be 91, and I could have scheduled this post for May 29, his birthday, rather than November 22. There are ways far simpler than assassination to rid ourselves of a president: one is to vote him or her out, one is to impeach and convict, and another is to sit back, wait, and thank God for term limits. I’m not even fond of the execution of deposed tyrants, though I support locking them up for the rest of their days.

Now, with a new president who breaks ground even more contentious than that of being the first Roman Catholic president, far too many tactless people have speculated on the dangers of being “first” in such a public way. Anyone who was alive in 1963 needs to work to ensure that the event I cannot remember from November of that year is never recreated in the person of any other president.

For Wednesday, I will bring you a song from a little yellow 78 rpm disc, and I’ll tell you about how the singer triumphed over Big Business to receive her just rewards. See you then.

Kennedy-Glenn