People Don’t Eat People; Purple People Eat People

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

Hanna Bar Boooo Ra

I'm writing from Philadelphia. I spent the day with Bobb Goldsteinn, the composer of "Washington Square," which I profiled twice already. I spent the evening on South Street, and I'd have to say that, if everyone got along as well as the diverse crowd on South Street did tonight, we would be a far better nation for it.

I'm in the computer room at the Holiday Inn. I tried to write this post last night, when I would have time to research what I was doing. I couldn't get any internet service last night, so I am going to be mercifully brief and give you a song with a minimalist story.

Following up on the Sterling Holloway CDs I discussed last time, I want to mention another LP that was aimed at kids and contained the audio portion of a video production.

Hanna-Barbera produced this one as a spinoff of sorts from The Flintstones. Sooper Snooper and Blabber Mouse starred in Monster Shindig. I lost the LP in the Great Vinyl Meltdown of 1972, but a guy on eBay was making copies of it available on CD a couple of years ago.

With a premise similar to that of "Monster Mash," but probably as a precursor to the Pickett tune, Monster Shindig was fun-creepy rather than downright scary. (I'll get to the scary records as Halloween approaches.) I can't give you a ton of details on the LP right now, because people could line up and want this PC at any moment, so I'd best just give you the song and go to my room.

Consider this post a space-holder until I get home and am able to provide a more profound look at the LP. Now you know how I write when my research tools are all locked up.

Have a great weekend, and expect a somewhat more detailed post on a Broadway musical phenomenon on Wednesday. See you then!

Monster Shindig:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/13075730e4ecc7e3/

From One Holloway to Another

I am taking a risk this week, but it’s one my readers should have seen coming. Though I was exposed to lots of very good (and very bad) pop music for adults when I was three to five years old, don’t forget that caithiseach was three years old, and for every ten Nat “King” Cole or Fats Domino tunes, there was one child’s recording of note.

Even so, I would have backed off the idea of sharing today’s story if there weren’t such a strong indication of grass-roots popularity among nostalgic adults for the tunes I have in mind today. I’m not talking about such terrible kiddie panderings as Strawberry Shortcake or Hello Kitty Sings Your Favourite Metal Lullabies. I’m talking about honest attempts to entertain children with enriching music and stories.

There is even a difference between child-oriented material that can get into the souls of adults, like “Sugar, Sugar,” and today’s featured music, which really didn’t try to hook parents. But I didn’t hear a lot of griping from my parents when I played this stuff, unlike the feedback that comes from overdoses of purple dinosaurs nowadays.

I suspect that today’s pieces got a pass from parents because, just as Red Holloway is a sax player for the ages, Sterling Holloway was blessed with a voice for the ages. And while you are sure to know that Sterling Holloway was the voice of Winnie the Pooh, you may not have heard some of his other classic work for children. Most of it has been unavailable for a long time, for reasons that can’t be made clear. Here’s your chance to check out these sounds, even if only to evaluate them for your children.

Most of us audiophiles have succumbed at times to the temptation to join a music-subscription service. I have been a member of the Columbia House Record Club, later the BMG CD Club, and I am about to bite the bullet and get into a CD-a-month club suggested by my friend whiteray. I don’t know how many of you had the good fortune to have your parents enroll you in a music club when you were two, but two-year-old caithiseach got an LP every month from Disneyland Records. The records tended to include the audio from films, including Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland.

What I found to be the cool thing about Disneyland records was that sides 1 and 2 were differentiated by showing one dot for Side 1 and two dots for Side 2. That was probably so kids who didn’t know their numbers could decide which side to put on. Since I was a fan of record labeling, I noted the innovation and remembered it.

Non-movie works came in the Disneyland series as well, and my two favorite LPs featured narration by Sterling Holloway. Both as the voice of Mother Goose (Disneyland DQ-1211) and the narrator of Peter and the Wolf, (DQ 1242), this Mr. Holloway provided me with just as much enjoyment as last week’s Mr. Holloway.

Sterling Holloway was born in 1905 in Cedartown, Georgia and died in 1992. He never lost his southern accent, and in a world where actors still affected Shakespearean tones in films, he logged about 100 feature films, many as a voice artist. He cropped up on television series often when I was a kid, and it was always a thrill to see the narrator of Peter and the Wolf acting live.

For that’s what he was to me: the narrator. I know he voiced Winnie the Pooh, and I was only six when he started that gig, but he had already imprinted himself on my musical consciousness via Disneyland Records by then.

I had a lively mind as a child, and I didn’t stand for baby crap in my audio world. Well, almost never. (Wait till December.) Mother Goose rhymes had the advantage of using big words and telling vivid stories, like maids having their noses snapped off by blackbirds. The way Sterling Holloway put the rhymes together, the story held your interest. Throughout this two-sided escapade, Sterling tried to recite “Peter Piper.” He flubbed it over and over, once getting as far as the final word, where he said “plick” for “pick.” [Spoiler here:] When he finally got the rhyme right at the end of the record, everyone on the recording cheered, and so did I. How could you not want Sterling Holloway to make good?

The other record on which he figured heavily was Peter and the Wolf/The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The Peter and the Wolf sequence came originally from a Disney film made up of shorts called Make Mine Music (1946). As far as I’m concerned, this is a legitimate rendering of Сергей Прокофьев’s wonderful work for children, which is the quintessential example of how to expose children to music. The Holloway narration is lively and imaginative; once my copy of this classic went away, I tried out some others, including Boris Karloff and (I think) Laurence Olivier. They stuck to Prokofiev’s narration, which is charming, but the Disney people (maybe Holloway himself) gave the animals names (the duck was Sonya, for example), which made all the difference for me. The emotion Holloway was willing to invest in his narration was unparalleled as well.

The flip side of that record took the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence from Fantasia (borrowed from Dukas from Goethe from Philopseudes), as well as the Paul Dukas music, and turned it into a short story narrated once again by Sterling Holloway. Peter and the Wolf lasts about 15 minutes, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice about ten. No commercial breaks, no video. Just sounds to make you imagine what was happening.

I mentioned that my record went away. Just one LP survived the Great Meltdown, and these weren’t the one. But a couple of really weird things happened in the 1980s.

One day I was looking at LPs around the time my elder son was born. I happened to be looking through the children’s section, and there it was: Mother Goose. I probably would have bought it anyway, but with the prospect of sharing it with my child, whether he was born yet or not, in mind, I could not pass it up. I remembered virtually all of the record even before I played it, but one song, “Myself” (see link below), sung by a young girl, hadn’t stuck in my memory.

As it turns out, the rhymes on this record were almost certainly drawn from The Real Mother Goose, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright and published by Rand McNally in 1916. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can see the book here.

The second odd thing happened at Wal-Mart. I know, you’re thinking that odd things happen all the time at Wal-Mart, so who is caithiseach to note such a thing? Well, my odd thing was that I was looking at some videos, and a bunch of Disney shorts had been combined on one VHS tape—including Peter and the Wolf. I snatched that one up as well. Just one copy, and I’ve not seen it since.

The original film Make Mine Music seems to have shown Sterling Holloway reading from Peter and the Wolf, whereas he makes no physical appearance in my video. The animation is classic early Disney, nothing cheap. If you or a little one you know likes Disney animation, you need to find this video.

For now, check out part of the audio of Peter and the Wolf, and some snippets from Mother Goose. If you’re a jaded adult, please don’t feel betrayed. There is plenty more oddball pop and R&B from the early 1960s coming your way before 2008 closes up shop. In fact, if you’re a jaded adult, this post, and the next one, are dedicated to you.

In addition to the audio below, I can give you a link to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice on YouTube. Embedding was disabled, or I would have the clip here. You can see the LP label and the cover there.

Blog note: After I post this, I am getting in the car and driving to Philadelphia. There, I will be shopping a bit of my writing and meeting one of the artists I have featured here. (My landlord will be making the rounds twice a day to feed my three pit bulls, so don’t get any ideas.) I am uploading the music for the next three posts today, and I should have no trouble staying on track. But if I happen to be late with a post anytime this month, it’s because of technical difficulties caused by my laptop.

If you’re going to be near Philadelphia on Friday, Saturday or Sunday (till noon or so), stop by the Holiday Inn at 4th and Arch and ask around for Seán Dwyer at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. Someone will know who I am and where to find me. I would love to thank you in person for reading this stuff.

For Saturday, I’ll be looking at another concoction aimed partly at kids, but this one is related to a prime-time animated series that dominated the genre until The Simpsons came along. See you Saturday!

Sterling Holloway, Peter and the Wolf Part 1

Mother Goose, Part 1

Mother Goose, Part 2

“Myself,” a song from Mother Goose

Belly Up to the Buffet

Today, May 31, jazz saxophonist James “Red” Holloway turns 81. About 45 years ago, I got hold of his debut single, “Simple Steps” (Mad 1297). This time, I’m going to examine the flip side of that single, “Ala Carte.”

First, in case you haven’t had a chance to check out the bio on his website, I’ll summarize it here. He attended DuSable High School in Chicago, and he was a classmate of saxophonist Johnny Griffin. When he was 16, Gene “The Senator” Wright, of Dave Brubeck fame, hired Red. After serving in the Army, Red played with Dexter Gordon and others. When he was 21, Roosevelt Sykes asked him to join the Sykes band. Later, Red played for Willie Dixon, Bobby “Blue” Bland, B.B. King, Lloyd Price and John Mayall, to name just a few.

Other musicians he backed include Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Lionel Hampton, Sonny Rollins and Sonny Stitt. From 1963 to 1966, Red played in Jack McDuff’s band, along with George Benson. Beginning in 1969, he held a 15-year gig at the Parisian Room in Los Angeles, where he also served as talent coordinator.

Though his associations gave him a lot of work as a blues saxophonist, his solo work leans toward jazz. If you check the last post, you’ll see what he can do in that idiom.

And when you listen to today’s song, you see just what a range he has.

The two rockers he released on Mad (part of an album’s worth of material he recorded, according to Robert Campbell’s Mad page) are extremely accessible tunes musically. The lyrics of the chorus to “Simple Steps” are a dance call, a precursor to the laid-back calling on “The Madison Time” by the Ray Bryant Combo. “Ala Carte,” however, is a different creature altogether.

A solid sax groove drives this tune, as it does “Simple Steps,” but Leon Hooper, the drummer and likely vocalist on this cut, added some gut-wrenching lyrics. The premise is odd food, and the food is odd: fried elephant lips, pig knees (better than pygmies, I presume), grasshopper toes, and the like. Hooper lines out a many-course meal for us, and considering how he starts to gargle at the end of the song, you get the feeling he sampled everything on the buffet line. At last he capitulates and asks for some baking soda.

Three-year-old caithiseach found the song’s menu very amusing. I wondered what some of these items would taste like. I didn’t turn up my nose at many foods. Once, my dad was eating something with horseradish on it. I asked to try it, and he refused. I persisted, and finally he decided to shut me up by giving me the horseradish. Now is when I’m supposed to say that I loved it, to his amazement. But he got the reaction he expected, and I didn’t eat horseradish again until I started using Chinese mustard. And then I discovered prime rib and horseradish sauce. Oh, my. I’m getting hungry.

The song talks about a lot of “foods” that are obtainable from animals, but not necessarily the parts one would eat. For example, I suppose that most people would eat elephant steaks rather than elephant lips, which are normally relegated to elephant hot dogs. Why eat just the toes of a grasshopper when the entire insect creates such a satisfyingly mouth-filling crunchiness?

Sure, you’ll say that we should not eat elephants. I agree. I never have eaten an animal that could be anywhere near the endangered list. No shark for me, no . . . elephant. But I have eaten ostrich, alligator, iguana, bison, squirrel, rabbit and, I suppose, a few I’ve forgotten. Among those options, I suggest the iguana, if you can get it baked and barbecued. Make sure they share the tail with you.

One time I tried to eat something unusual and failed. When I lived in Mexico, my favorite food was pozole, a soup made of pork and dried hominy. A good pot of pozole required a pig’s head, as well as loin and perhaps shoulder meat. The brains were cooked in foil separately from the rest of the head, and as for the pig’s eyes . . . my future sister-in-law Lupe always got those.

Being the adventurous eater I was, I asked once if I could try one of the eyes. She agreed, and I took the spoon. I was about to pop it into my mouth when I realized that the eyelashes, as black and even as those on a child’s doll, were still attached. In fact, they were fluttering coquettishly in my direction. I gave back the eye.

My cowardice aggravated me, and a year later, I had another chance. For the very same reason, I begged off again. Now I was really annoyed with myself.

About ten years later, a student of mine who lived on a farm mentioned that her family was going to slaughter a pig. I got her to promise to bring me an eye, and she did. I took it home and cooked it. Overcooked it, in fact; it didn’t look like the Mexican pigs’ eyes. But I popped it into my mouth and started chewing. It reminded me of a golf ball made of chicken gizzard. (Now you don’t have to try one.)

I’m over that particular challenge, but I still love unusual good food. Just not the stuff Leon Hooper suggested in the song, like baboon eyeballs. Check out his menu and the intense sax.

Next week, I’ll lead from Red Holloway into the most obvious segue of the year. See you then!

Red Holloway, Ala Carte

Ala Carte label

Simply a Jazz Legend

For several years, I have known that today’s artist is not the obscure entity that his 45 on a small Chicago label would imply. When Uncle Tom brought the 45s to me (he gave me two copies, bought on different record runs), they came from the usual bargain bin. The single didn’t chart. Three-year-old caithiseach cranked it a lot, though, and the two sides broadened my horizons plenty.

First of all, the A-side, “Simple Steps” by James “Red” Holloway (Mad 1297), set the tone for many caithiseach favorites: growly baritone sax, an energizing 1-4-5 progression (think “Why Wait” with a rockier beat) and a clean guitar solo that has a tinge of jazz to it. During the sax solo, the bass line is distinctly jazzy, but I didn’t notice that when I was three years old.

It’s a good thing Uncle Tom picked up two copies of this gem: one died in the Great Meltdown. The Survivor hasn’t fared all that well; it’s nearly Ground to Dust, and there are parallel cracks, one across the entire playing surface, and another halfway through, close enough to the first crack to make losing a chunk of the styrene a serious threat. I have transferred the song to my hard drive, of course, and a search will show you where you can get both sides of this 45 on CD. I don’t have the CD yet, so I can’t tell you how good it sounds. Even with the option of acquiring the songs on CD, I would hate to have my 45 break, so I am being extra careful with it.

The label has one of the busiest logos I have seen on a 45. I liked it when I was a kid, but I also couldn’t see it very well until I entered the first grade, when people figured out that I needed glasses. See the label here.

There are little man-faces with huge noses peering over the letters, with music notes weaving behind the letters. I can describe the logo, but I can’t tell you what it means.

About four years ago, I decided to look for a cleaner copy of the 45, and I found something even better: a website devoted to Mad Records. Professor Robert Campbell of Clemson University is responsible for this excellent labor of love, and I am proud to have contributed both the label scans and the sounds of this 45 to his research. You can see the site here. There is a lot of information there, so you’ll have to scroll partway down the page to find today’s song.

I scanned the label of my 45, then Professor Campbell cleaned it up, and I took the jpg from his site, so consider that a statement of credit.

What I have learned about James “Red” Holloway is that he has, over time, become an intensely respected jazz saxophonist. He’s an Arkansas native, born in Helena on May 31, 1927. Yes, I chose this slot and the next to discuss his music in order to honor his birthday. He is still active; you can book him via his website. But good luck finding an open slot in his schedule; he’s performing constantly throughout 2008, including the Red Holloway Jazz & Blues Festival in his hometown on July 26, six weeks in Europe in September-October and a Thanksgiving trip to Japan. Nice.

When three-year-old caithiseach was playing Red’s 45 regularly, there was no way of knowing that the singer/sax player had performed with Dizzy Gillespie, would later cut a couple of albums with Sonny Stitt, and could play “clarinet, flute, piccolo, piano, bass, drums, and violin,” according to his site bio. There is so much to say about this varied and exciting career that I would do well to step aside and let you peruse the two websites to which I have linked.

Professor Campbell’s page states that Red recorded enough tracks during the Mad sessions of late 1958 or early 1959 to make up a complete album, but only the tracks on this 45 were released. I really liked this double-sided caithiseach hit, so I am hoping the tapes are sitting somewhere, waiting for some motivated investigator to rescue them.

Red Holloway wrote “Simple Steps.” On the recording, Leon Hooper plays drums, and McKinley (Mac) Easton most likely provides the baritone underpinning. The organist and the guitarist are unknown. A lot of research has been done, so the missing information may well never come to light.

Mad Records was set up in Chicago in 1957 by a jazzy saxophonist, Tommy “Mad Man” Jones. He kept the label and a companion, M&M Records, going until 1991. Jones was responsible for the debuts of a number of significant artists, including Red Holloway and Oscar Brown Jr.

Over the course of this blog, I’ve discovered that I owned some famous songs (“Midnight Sun”) and early work by people with great futures (Marlin Greene) or amazing connections (Bob Keefe). I don’t think anyone in my collection can top Red Holloway’s musical range, contacts or longevity.

To show you what this man is capable of, I’m including a cut from a 1964 LP, Brother Red, which shows his prowess as a jazz saxophonist in a setting where he is in charge.

After this first taste, I’ll share more about him Saturday. See you on the flip side!

Red Holloway, Simple Steps

Red Holloway, Brother Red

Moonfolk, Dragons and Other Puppets

Between the first Bob Keefe post on Wednesday and this one, I received a very helpful email from Yah Shure, who shared his expertise at reading matrix numbers on 45s. I had looked up matrix numbers before, so I should have thought to search for this one. However, I would not have gotten as far with the information as Yah Shure did.

It is evident from the matrix number (K90W-5529) that “The Genie in the Bottle” was a 1959 release. I was being whimsical when I suggested that Scope 1964 had to be from 1964, but I didn’t know if its line about divorce and a horse came before or after the theme to Mr. Ed. “Genie” came first, so now we can wonder if Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, the “Silver Bells” guys, heard “Genie” before the horse started talking.

I was being extra silly when I suggested that a meticulous secretary typed the matrix number of the 45 on the disc. The RCA plant that did custom pressings for smaller labels stamped the matrix number onto the master. Yah Shure gave me that background; he also understood that I was creating an absurdist scenario for lack of better details to discuss, and I hope you did, too!

The flip of this now-somewhat less mysterious single is “Satellite Sadie,” a tune that Bob Keefe penned. I want to talk about the song, and then I’ll discuss a connection I discovered to a completely different realm of entertainment.

I wrote in April that I found (find?) moon exploration intriguing. I have read, and concocted myself, numerous scenarios involving life on the moon that would be somewhat workable under the right circumstances. There are, of course, things that can’t happen. For the ones that could, you just suspend a bit of disbelief, mostly in the politics involved and the shortsightedness of said politicians.

“Satellite Sadie” is one of those songs that could be enjoyed in the Sputnik era but suffered once Apollo came along and nixed the idea of life on the moon. The protagonist discusses his new-found love, Sadie, who has pale green skin and is nine feet tall and just one inch wide. By 1969, I was aware that there simply were not going to be any moon creatures, so I could no longer believe in Sadie’s story. Nowadays, I also have problems with the connectivity issues presented by marrying a woman who is one inch wide. (The nine-foot-tall part doesn’t faze me.)

The guy in the song, though, has to contend with atmospheric issues as well, whether he lives with Sadie on the moon or brings her to Earth, where she would get drunk on the increased oxygen levels and, I suppose, flop over from the increased gravity. If she’s green because of photosynthesis, we face another dilemma altogether. Goodness. But the song is fun, and I don’t want you to judge its premise as harshly as I do.

I would be done with this essay were it not for a bit of research luck that takes me in a completely different direction now. I told you last time that I looked up the publisher for “Genie,” Studio Music, and realized it would be impossible to sift through all of the hits. BMI didn’t cooperate, so I was stuck.

Then I searched for both Studio Music and the publisher of “Satellite Sadie,” Spindletop Music. I almost drew a blank there, too, but perseverance got me a nugget I’ll share now.

One link led me to a web page that was not at all user-friendly. After five minutes of trying to search a mountain of data, I copied the entire text and pasted it into a Word document. Spindletop appeared on page 19 of 56 single-spaced pages. It was worth the delay and the search to see what I saw.

The document was a huge listing of music copyright holders and publishing company owners. By 1978, both Studio Music and Spindletop Music were the property of a guy named Archie Levington. As I said once in a previous post, at this point you are either drawing a blank or hearing bells go off.

Archie Levington was a song promoter for Leeds Music. He worked for Motown (Jobete) in the mid-1960s, but clearly he had some link to Scope Records: he wound up owning both Studio Music and Spindletop Music at some point, maybe even when Bob Keefe was singing for them. By all accounts, he was a wonderful man with a very engaging personality. The document that talks of his multiple publishing interests states that his properties were controlled by his executrix, Frances Allison Levington.

Archie Levington was married to Fran Allison for forty years. From the time I became aware of television, I enjoyed watching Fran Allison’s charming conversations with her friends, Ollie and Kukla.

Kukla, Fran and Ollie appeared on Chicago television beginning in 1947. I don’t know if I saw them on NBC, local Chicago TV or just in later incarnations; I can’t get a good read on their schedule in the early 1960s. But caithiseach loved these two puppets: the one-toothed dragon Ollie, an aspiring writer like caithiseach, and his sidekick, Kukla. They were the creations of Burr Tillstrom, who did all of the voices for the show. These guys, along with the lovely Fran, held a Nielsen share of 17 during their heyday. It wasn’t just kids who watched their antics.

In 1967, the CBS Children’s Film Festival debuted, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie hosted the show. They introduced the films, which often were foreign films. Among the films I saw on their show were The Red Balloon (1956) and Lili (1953). Lili was based on a short story by Paul Gallico called “The Man Who Hated People.” The man, a puppeteer, falls in love with a young girl, but he can speak to her only through his puppets. Paul Gallico’s inspiration for the story? Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

I can’t tell you how much Lili entranced me. There is just one song in the film, “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo,” and I find it to be one of the most sweetly sad melodies I have ever heard, second, perhaps, to the theme of the second movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. Written by Bronislau Kaper (1902-1983) and Helen Deutsch (1906-1992), “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” charted in May, 1953 in its original form, as sung by the film’s stars, Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer.

I am not sure how the film can resonate so much with me, as I saw it just once, on the KFO film series. That was about forty years ago. When I saw the film that evening, the song made me weep. As I write now, I have tears in my eyes. I should probably watch the movie again.

I know the story was so bittersweet that I could barely stand it. Unrequited love, constant longing, whatever it is, it got me. It still does, and I can’t even remember what Mel Ferrer looks like.

I will cause a chuckle or two when I say it, but all this leads us to Gene Vincent.

Eugene Vincent Craddock (1935-1971) recorded the amazing slow rockabilly number “Be-Bop-A-Lula” in 1956. He stopped having hits in the U.S. in 1958. He survived the 1960 taxi crash that killed Eddie Cochran. In 1966, he recorded for Challenge Records an album called Am I That Easy to Forget, with backing by Glen Campbell, David Gates, Jim Seals, Dash Crofts and others. Among the songs he recorded for the album was “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo.”

The overbearing echo of “Be-Bop-A-Lula” is gone, and if you thought the reverb was there to mask a lousy voice, you are absolutely wrong. A tender, slow reading of an already sensitive song moves it in a completely different direction from the French-peasant feel of the Caron-Ferrer version. Gene Vincent takes complete possession of this song. As if it weren’t already hard enough for me to listen to the movie version without emotion, it’s nearly impossible for me to ignore the power of the Vincent recording.

I didn’t discover Gene Vincent’s version until last year, when I found it on eMusic. It’s one of the best discoveries of my experiment-with-new-recordings phase, which began in 1962 and is still going on.

And that, friends, is what I know about “Satellite Sadie”: Bob Keefe wrote for Spindletop Music, which was owned by Archie Levington, who was married to Fran Allison, whose show inspired Lili, whose one song was recorded by Gene Vincent. Now, if only Gene Vincent had recorded with Bob Keefe, the circle would be unbroken.

Nah. Not going there.

Wednesday, we’ll revisit my hero, Jeff Barry, in a new context, working with another hero of mine. See you then!

Bob Keefe, Satellite Sadie

Gene Vincent, Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo

Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer, Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo

Dvořák, Cello Concerto, Rostropovich/von Karajan, DG 413 819-2

Satellite Sadie label scan

My Uncle Tom

On December 28, 1959, “Wishful Thinking” by Wynn Stewart began a 22-week run in the Country Top 40. Wynn Stewart, whom I featured in my Wednesday post, wrote the tune with his sister Beverly. They were talking about another sister, Patty, who was homesick. If you listen at all to country music, you will recognize this tune as a superb precursor to the Bakersfield sound that made Buck Owens and Merle Haggard stars; in fact, Merle used this shuffle sound as late as 1984 in “Let’s Chase Each Other Around the Room.”

I can appreciate the song now, and I would have appreciated it somewhat in 1963, because the jukebox in the Dwyer Café in Shoals, Indiana was jammed with country music, and I played my share of it when I was visiting my grandparents. Three-year-old caithiseach was a rocker by nature, but he was also open-minded enough to enjoy good songs in any genre. (I have been mocked for refusing to despise any style of music per se, but I don’t care.)

“Wishful Thinking” starts with a confident, clean fiddle, adds a tasteful steel guitar, and turns to a driving shuffle beat. I have always been a sucker for shuffles, and the pace allows the instruments to fill the sonic space without rushing. Wynn Stewart’s lyrics, likewise, combine tasteful phrasing with a melody that is in his wheelhouse; he nails every note he sings.

Why was it, then, that I didn’t play the A side of this single for 35 years? Simply because the B side imprinted itself on me, and there was no time for “Wishful Thinking” when I wanted a Wynn Stewart fix.

The B side, “Uncle Tom Got Caught,” evoked images of my Uncle Tom, the source of most of my 45s, getting into trouble. Since he was about 45 years old, the idea of his getting caught at some mischief struck me as incredibly funny. And now, as I write this essay on Christmas Day, 2007, it’s time I introduced my readers to the man who made this blog possible.

Thomas Joseph Gibbons Jr. was born in Gary, Indiana in 1917. He was the fourth of ten children born to Thomas Sr. and Henrietta Brown Gibbons. Tommy was getting a career started at U.S. Steel when World War II broke out. He spent a good chunk of time in the Pacific Theater. In fact, he became the indispensable aide to a general there (because he could type) and wound up being required longer than most draftees. When he got home, he stayed away from his parents’ house for a couple of weeks while he fattened himself up, for fear that his mother would collapse if she saw him.

He and his wife didn’t have children, and I became a surrogate son to him. He adored his youngest sister, Phyllis, who happened to be my mother, so he drove 75 blocks from work a couple of times a week to visit us. That’s when the records arrived, as well as other tidbits and the occasional spiffy gift, including a monogrammed gold pinky ring. Holy cow. I wore that thing to school. It just now strikes me to wonder what my classmates thought of that when I was in the first grade.

My mom’s health was always a bit fragile after a bout of rheumatic fever when she was a teen, and Uncle Tom was protective of her. He worried that she was taking on too much when she wanted to adopt a set of infant twins, boys whose foster care with my mom he had helped arrange. Something got said, and Uncle Tom stopped coming over.

Uncle Tom arranged for me to attend Goodfellow Camp, a summer camp near Lake Michigan that was run by the Goodfellow Club of U.S. Steel. I attended from 1969 to 1974. I learned to swim there, and I was there when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. He landed after lights out, so we weren’t allowed to see the video feed. I heard his words on the radio.

When my mom died in January, 1970, Uncle Tom let my Aunt Eileen do most of the mop-up work with me. He wasn’t unavailable, just knew when to keep his distance. I saw more of him at his mother’s funeral in 1974. We talked about how things were, and about the future.

My dad remarried, and I lost touch with most of my mother’s family. The next time I saw Uncle Tom was in 1978. I had just gotten off work as a dishwasher at a restaurant near a mall in Merrillville, Indiana, and he and his wife were buying chocolate at the Fannie May store. I was walking over to them, but I froze, because I was covered in muck from work, and I was embarrassed. And that was that.

In 1986, I got a letter from his older sister, Viola. She told me he was at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was in Bloomington, Indiana, starting a PhD program. I called the hospital and got him on the phone. I asked if he knew who was calling. He guessed that it was another nephew, Tom Gibbons. I said no, it’s Seán Dwyer. He repeated my name slowly, seemingly savoring it. I told him I was coming to see him. And I did. I drove eleven hours the next day and went to his room. He, his wife and I visited for a while. He said, among other things, that he was very glad to see I had survived my teen years, after what had gone on from the time I turned nine. They also put me back in touch with Aunt Eileen.

They were living in Florida then, so I didn’t see him after his treatment. He lived about two years, and we stayed in touch by phone. I was able to tell him my wife was going to have a second child, whose name would be Thomas if he turned out to be a boy. He did, but my son Tom was still in the womb when we attended Uncle Tom’s funeral.

I lost a lot of opportunities to have more time with my uncle, and with my mother’s entire family. I’ll take this opportunity to suggest that, if you ever have stepchildren, you help them stay in touch with their biological family. There is no value in being territorial, jealous or afraid of the results of such generosity. My Uncle Tom would never have tried to keep me or turn me against my parents, but some more time with him would have been a big help to me.

And maybe all that makes this an appropriate tune to spin now. Thanks for the 45s, Uncle Tom.

Wynn Stewart, Wishful Thinking

Wishful Thinking label scan

Uncle Tom Got Vinyl

If you have visited this blog before, you know that the main source for my music collection when I was very young was my Uncle Tom. When he came over to visit, I would look to see if he had brought a stack of 45s. Whenever he did bring a gift, he presented them to me with a grand gesture, and I responded appropriately. Despite this ritual exchange between us, I can remember only one specific reaction from his sister, my mom, and it occurred after he had left for the evening.

I’ll tell you more about Uncle Tom on Saturday, when I have less to say about this week’s artist. I’ll tell you now that, when I spun today’s song for the first time, my mom smirked and said to my dad, “I wonder if Tom saw the title of this one before he bought it.” I’m sure he would have commented if he’d known he had bought “Uncle Tom Got Caught” by Wynn Stewart.

This song became one of my favorites, not only because it mentioned my music source, but because it’s a darn good song. Bouncy, clever lyrics, a subtext I did not understand when I was three, or even five, a vivid story I appreciate as a songwriter. Three-year-old caithiseach responded to the guitar solo, the superb voice, and the refrain: “Uncle Tom Got Caught,” which was supremely amusing in context.

Almost forty years later, I was so used to learning that my artists on 45 were irredeemable no-names that I was surprised, as well as very pleased, to learn that Wynn Stewart was a near-giant of country music. His story begins at the beginning of country music’s huge years, so let’s go back there.

A Missouri native, Winford Stewart was born on June 7, 1934 and was performing on the radio by age 13. His talent was such that, when the family moved to California in 1948, he soon earned a recording contract. He was signed to Capitol by 1956, when his first Top 40 country hit, “The Waltz of the Angels,” climbed to #14. He didn’t have a hit again until he moved to the Challenge label, where he made the Top 40 four times, including the #5 tune “Wishful Thinking” (Challenge 9061; my 45 says 59061). “Uncle Tom Got Caught” is the B side of “Wishful Thinking.” The single came to me as a leftover from a store rather than a label cutout or DJ copy, the usual sources for my collection.

Wynn’s biggest hit was the #1 smash “It’s Such a Pretty World Today,” which received a nomination for the Country Music Association Song of the Year for 1967. All told, he hit #1 once, the Top Ten six times, and charted 19 Top 40 country hits. His chart life extended from 1956 to 1979. I could have heard him on the radio; twice in my teen years I made myself listen to country-formatted WMAQ (Chicago) for a few weeks at a time. I got familiar with the hits, and even liked a few, but those listening periods were in 1972 and 1974, and Wynn charted both before and after those periods but not while I was a listener. I would have recognized his name and been stunned to know he had made the big time.

But despite his respectable chart success, people don’t consider him a huge star. Why? As a chief engineer of the Bakersfield Sound, he encouraged and influenced the careers of the likes of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. He wrote Haggard’s first hit, “Sing a Sad Song.” With these two amazing careers overshadowing his, Wynn Stewart could not be considered the most successful proponent of the Bakersfield Sound. In fact, Ralph Mooney, who played steel guitar for Buck, Merle and Wynn, called Wynn “the best singer who ever lived.” Wynn’s website says that Wynn lacked the “whatever it takes” attitude that got Merle and Buck to the top. Sources say that Wynn persisted in pushing Buck’s demo tape at Capitol until the label signed him.

Wynn Stewart wrote some of his own hits, including “Wishful Thinking.” He didn’t write “Uncle Tom Got Caught”; this song was the work of Clifton Crofford, also known as Cliff Crawford. Crawford wrote “Old Rivers,” a hit for Walter Brennan. (“Old Rivers” will become an inadvertent topic of conversation around Halloween. I can’t wait.) He wrote “Bar Room Buddies” for Wynn’s protégé, Merle Haggard, and “A Texas State of Mind” for David Frizzell and Shelly West. Frizzell is the younger brother of Lefty Frizzell, some of whose band members wound up working with Wynn Stewart in Bakersfield. It’s all one big circle out there, folks.

I should point out that "Uncle Tom Got Caught" is closer to rockabilly than to true country. There's not much of a twang to it, and the guitar solo would sound at home on any Top 40 hit of the era.

During his career, Wynn Stewart owned a Las Vegas night club he called Nashville Nevada; he had a Vegas television program of his own then; he owned two record labels, WIN and Pretty World. He was cranking up the latter label in a bid for a mid-1980s comeback when he died suddenly of a heart attack on July 17, 1985, just as he was to resume touring. It’s sad that he didn’t get this last shot at iconic status, and also that he would be only 74 in 2008. We lost Wynn Stewart far too early, and I hope that his voice, described as one of the purest country voices, encourages you to look him up.

You can find his work on Bear Family Records, most notably via a 10-disc box set that includes all 279 of his recorded tracks:

Buy the Wynn Stewart box set

That set costs 173 euros, and if I’m not mistaken, there are 173 euros to a dollar, so the 10-disc set costs just $1. God bless Germany and Bear Family Records.

But I could be mistaken about the exchange rate, too.

The best source for Wynn Stewart info is a site run by his daughter, Wren Stewart Tidwell:

Official Wynn Stewart website

Wynn was inducted into the Missouri Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006. The Nashville version of this honor hasn’t caught up with him yet. It’s time.

A note on the recording: I have two unsatisfactory sources for this great song: my original 45, which is scratchy, and an mp3 I made from a low-resolution RealAudio version. If you grew up with scratchy vinyl, the 45 won’t bother you. If you can’t take the surface noise, you can listen to the RealAudio file, which has a compromised high end but no scratches.

Saturday will see me turn the single over, as it were, but the file is CD quality. See you on the flip side!

Wynn Stewart, Uncle Tom Got Caught 45

Wynn Stewart, Uncle Tom Got Caught low-res recording

Uncle Tom Got Caught label

Why Wait?

This week’s music didn’t reach me on 45, and my Uncle Tom didn’t buy it for me. I bought today’s song myself when I was five, without ever having heard it.

In my dad’s home town, Shoals, Indiana, the Alco Dime Store was the place to shop for everything other than clothing, which you bought from Lawrence “Son” Sorrels at Queen’s Clothing Store. If you wanted to eat, you went to the Dwyer Café, where my grandmother cooked you anything from a hamburger to an oyster sandwich. The Dwyer Café had the best jukebox ever, but I’ll get to that in April.

One day, my dad and I went to the dime store to spend my accumulated allowance. I looked at the toys, but I wasn’t intrigued by anything, so I wandered a bit. I happened upon a stack of records that looked like LPs but had just one song per side. My dad told me they were 78s. I remembered then that my record player had a setting for 78, but I didn’t know what it did. I gathered up the dozen or so 78s I could afford, and off we went.

When we got back to Gary, I started playing the records. I had purchased “Stroll Me”/“Rockin’ Chair” by Kay Starr, a 1957 single that never charted. I also acquired two Jimmy Boyd 78s, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”/“Thumbelina” and “My Bunny and My Sister Sue”/“Two Easter Sunday Sweethearts.” Really, I just grabbed what was there, sort of the way Uncle Tom did with 45s.

One 78 that stood out from the crowd was an Atlantic release. One day I took it to kindergarten, because Mrs. Ballinger let us bring in songs to play during nap time (her favorite time of day, I’m sure). When I brought in my song, she asked if it was slow, as per the guidelines for naptime songs. Five-year-old caithiseach said, “It’s sort of slow,” and it was, compared to “Flight of the Bumblebee.” But the second the needle hit the 78, the kids started rocking and rolling, clapping and swaying in the dim naptime light. I covered my head and waited for Mrs. Ballinger to take me to task for the debacle, but she smiled and let it go.

On the way home from school that day, one of the carpool kids, my friend Glen Fuller, sat on the record and snapped it in two. When I started to complain, the carpool driver, who happened to be my mom, said I had no business griping if I had put the record on the seat in the first place. I shut up. I don’t know for sure which Atlantic release it was, and that irks me, because I really dug that tune.

That 78 wasn’t the only one that broke. Since they were made of lacquer rather than vinyl, they were all prone to chipping or cracking. When the Jimmy Boyd 78s broke, I could see that they were so heavy because they were reinforced with a cardboard center. Knowing how 78s were put together didn’t make me any happier about how fast my stock dwindled.

The background I just laid leads to the focus of today’s post, a song that expanded my musical horizons more quickly than anything else I owned.

The 78 was an RCA release. It fascinated me how fast the little dog spun on this 78. The tonearm ate up the groove so fast you could see it move, unlike an LP, or even a 45. The artist was foreign, perhaps Mexican. These were my first impressions of this new experience of playing 78 rpm records.

And now, I present to you “Why Wait” by Pérez Prado and His Orchestra. Dámaso Pérez Prado wrote the song, and Herman Díaz Jr. (the orchestra's regular producer) produced it with Johnnie Camacho.

I latched onto this side of the 78, even though the A side, “Patricia,” was a fine song and a big hit. I’ll talk about the A side on Saturday.

Even if five-year-old caithiseach had known “Patricia” was the side that had sold the 78 originally, he would have preferred “Why Wait.” I was always a sucker for lively rhythms, and if a song had a horn section, it got high marks for that. This cut had a twangy guitar playing a 1-4-5 progression throughout, and somewhere in the mono mix I heard what sounded like bongos. It was pure sonic heaven. I started drum lessons that year, and I asked my dad to buy me bongos at Sparks Music in Gary, Indiana so I could play along with “Why Wait.”

If I underestimate and say that I played the song just twice a week, by 1978, when I went to college, I played that 78 1300 times. In fact, I often played it three times in a row, so the total plays must top 5000. You can tell from the scan of the 78 that the record got a lot of use. Even so, I treated it with care, and it survived the Great Meltdown, as well as many moves.

I’ll give you some background on the man Saturday. For now, I want to bring up one thing about the career of Pérez Prado that aggravates me. More than almost any other artist, Pérez Prado requires a discography such as this one: www.laventure.net/tourist/prez.htm if one is going to get a representative collection of his work. I’ve heard that his complete RCA recordings appeared in a Japanese box set, but I’ve not come across it. I own 213 of his recordings, and there are still a large number of RCA releases I can’t find on CD. I own 20 CDs of his music, with just two being original albums. One recording, of “María Bonita,” appears on eight of my CDs. “Patricia” appears on several, including one remastered version in stereo.

Here’s what bugs me: The version of “Why Wait” I have on the 78 is not on any of those CDs.

First of all, the song hasn’t been transferred to an official Pérez Prado compilation at all, as far as I can tell. A mono version that has an electric guitar overdub in the chorus appeared in the RCA Space Age Music series, as well as in the Rhino Cocktail Mix series, on the CD I bought that includes “Washington Square.” Perhaps if I had heard the version with the guitar overdub first, I would be satisfied with it, but I grew up with a guitar-free version, and I want it on CD.

“Why Wait” appeared on the Pérez Prado album Dilo (¡Ugh!), which was released in both mono and stereo versions. The LP is regularly available in mono on eBay, but I have yet to see a stereo copy come up for auction. I would love to hear the original song in stereo, even on vinyl. Considering that Pérez Prado’s work was released in stereo far earlier than many artists’, it shouldn’t be that hard to transfer the stereo mix of “Why Wait” to CD.

Oh, I do own a stereo version of “Why Wait” on CD. But it’s a remake he did long after my 78 came out. You have to be careful about his records—he re-recorded most of his repertoire at some point, especially after he left RCA. Very few of these recycled versions rival the originals, though a handful do.

In sum, I own the best recording of “Why Wait” on a mono LP. I own an overdubbed mono version on CD. I own a bad stereo remake on CD. And I can’t get what I want. I can’t even get what I need.

In my quest for the exact recording I want, I have learned that there are several other songs named “Why Wait” that are pretty good. You can find them on Rhapsody. A German group that calls itself Tennessee did a pretty nice job with the Pérez Prado tune. Lots of twangy guitar, but it belongs in their arrangement. I’ll include it here.

Also, I am offering you another tune, “Machaca,” that was recorded around the same time as “Why Wait,” in 1957. “Machaca” was released in stereo, and I envision “Why Wait” with a similar sound if it is ever released in stereo on CD.

End of rant. What I am giving you all to hear is the original version of “Why Wait” I heard when I was five years old. I seem to put it on all my compilation CDs, and I have never skipped over it because I was tired of hearing it. It is one of the few true classics to come from my childhood record collection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Saturday, I’ll look at the other side of the 78, “Patricia.” See you on the flip side!

Pérez Prado and His Orchestra, Why Wait

Why Wait scan

Tennessee, Why Wait

Pérez Prado and His Orchestra, Machaca

Fats Wednesday

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

By all rights, I shouldn’t have gotten any records by Fats Domino or Little Richard from my Uncle Tom. These were two huge artists, commercially successful icons whose 45s fell outside the purview of my source, the Big Top department store. Despite the quality of their music, I have a quality-control rejection to thank for their presence in my 1963 record collection.

As you can see if you look at this label scan, my copy of “Blue Monday” would be considered defective. Some label-attaching machine went haywire, and an eagle-eyed worker at Imperial Records tossed my copy into a cutout bin. What happened to my Specialty 45s from Little Richard was a bit different. A couple of the labels had purple smears on the yellow-and-white color scheme, one label was blurred, and I believe yet another was printed as a mirror image. All of my defective Specialty 45s finished their lives in the Great Meltdown, so I can’t show you what a mess those labels were.

Thanks to this label defect, I got my first taste of the guy that three-year-old caithiseach simply called Fats. Until the day in late 1963 when I declared that a hit song (one I’ll profile in April) was my favorite song, Fats Domino stood above all the other artists I knew as my favorite performer.

I have chosen to include Fats in my blog of mostly obscure recordings because February 26, 2008 will be his 80th birthday. This post also marks roughly 45 years of my admiration of his work.

Fats is a New Orleans native, given the birth name of Antoine Dominique Domino. His tendency to portliness was the obvious source of his nickname, one that served as the inspiration for the nickname of Ernest Evans: Chubby Checker. Fats charted his first hit in 1950, “The Fat Man.” That song was the intended B side of “Detroit City Blues”; from the beginning of his career, the B sides of Fats Domino records charted well.

Fats logged 37 Top 40 hits, including 11 Top Ten hits. He never hit #1, though “Blueberry Hill” sat at #2 for three weeks.

His chief collaborator was Dave Bartholomew, producer and co-writer of numerous Fats hits, including “Ain’t It (That) a Shame” and “Blue Monday.” Bartholomew is still performing at age 87. Both are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Extensive biographies of the man exist elsewhere. So does information about his close call with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but I want to reflect on that terrible time for a moment.

New Orleans is where my ancestors landed when they immigrated from Ireland. My grandfather’s grandparents are buried there. Concern for their graves crossed my mind when Katrina struck, and the second thing that occurred to me was that Fats lived there.

I had wanted for years to write him a fan letter. It’s such an easy thing to do; often, if not always, appreciated, and yet a task that tends to sit on the back burner. Fats wouldn’t notice if I didn’t write him a thank-you note for all the music, but I would. According to early reports, it was too late. Fats had stayed in New Orleans to tend to his ill wife, and chances were good that he had perished in the hurricane.

We lost Barry Cowsill, and who knows how many other talented people, to Katrina, but in a near-miraculous turn of events, Fats and his wife were evacuated and taken to the Superdome. Their house was a mess, and Fats lost many prized career-related items. One of his first post-Katrina efforts was to release a new album, Alive and Kickin’, the proceeds of which go to Tipitina's Foundation, to benefit New Orleans musicians displaced by Katrina. The foundation serves also to encourage the reestablishment of the New Orleans local music scene. You can help the foundation and celebrate Fats’s 80th birthday by buying his album here:

Buy Fats Domino's new CD

Fats is in good voice on the title cut, which he recorded in 2006. Amazing. He returned to live performing on May 19th, 2007, my birthday. What a birthday present. Thanks, Fats, for everything. If you're in New Orleans on Saturday, you can catch his latest appearance.

Now, give “Blue Monday” (Imperial 5417) a spin. It made the Top 40 on January 12, 1957 and reached #5. Fats wrote the song with Dave Bartholomew for the film The Girl Can't Help It. If you don’t own any Fats, get some. More Fats to come on Saturday, so I’ll see you on the flip side!

Fats Domino, Blue Monday

Blue Monday label scan

Angels to the Rescue

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

Some cross-pollination has occurred in the past couple of days. My friend whiteray mentioned on February 6 in his blog, Echoes in the Wind, that he and I have differing approaches to blogging. He and I know that, but it seems pertinent to give some details on that matter, so look for a second Saturday post coming shortly. Now, on with the scheduled program:

I feared this might be a spectacularly short post. I told you everything I know about Danny Kellarney last time, which is next to nothing. I told you what I know about the songwriters for the A side, “Jealous.” I told you about the orchestra leader. Thank goodness the B side, “You Can't Fool an Angel” (Fraternity 783) was written by a different set of guys. That gives me another bit of history to develop for this post.

Or not. You can see from the label that, because the song had four writers, Fraternity Records didn’t even give first initials, much less the whole names.

So, I looked up the last names anyway. ASCAP reports no Herig or Fiume, no likely Henn, and a couple of weak possibilities for Moss.

Just look up the title, you say. ASCAP shows no record of the song, though it was published originally by Windy City Music, ASCAP. No BMI record, either.

The song probably was not written as far back as “Jealous” (1924), but that could account for its disappearance into the ether, or it could have gone into the public domain and not been restored to copyright protection. In that case, if you’re looking for a song to cover for your next album, have a listen to this poor wee tune that no one loves any more. You can record it for free.

I can tell you that, despite losing this 45 in the Great Meltdown in 1972, I remembered the label name, the artist, and the title of the B side. How did I remember all that? 1. The Fraternity label was fairly distinctive, 2. I didn’t think people should try to fool angels, and 3. I associated the singer’s name with Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. Doing so made the online search for his name more difficult, but I found his record, obviously. And that’s all I can say about Danny Kellarney. There is one more tidbit I can add once I confirm it, and if that happens, I’ll make a special update post.

Rather than stop writing here, I’ll use the leftover space to reminisce about another tune I lost in the Great Meltdown, one I will most likely never see again. The title, as I recall, was “I’ve Got to Lose These Blues.” The label was Hi-Hat Records, blue with a silver logo. If you do a search for the label name, you find a current label that specializes in square dance/hoedown calling records. Their logo, a high top hat with a walking stick, is very similar to the label of the 45 I owned, so they may have bought the rights to the name and logo.

This new label has interesting wares. You must listen to this square dance version of “Don’t Be Cruel,” called by Masaru Wada! If you are a square dancer, I endorse their products.

But, oh, do I ever digress. So, Hi Hat Records released in the late 1950s a song with the aforementioned title, or one very similar to it. I don’t know the artist. But the songwriter was Bernie O’Neill, my uncle by marriage.

Let me tell you, when you’re a little music fiend like three-year-old caithiseach, you think it is very cool that your uncle wrote a song that made it onto a record. It may well be that I learned what the names in parentheses on a 45 meant when my mom told me Uncle Bernie had written the tune. Once I was old enough to read, I saw that she wasn’t kidding: B. O’Neill was listed as the songwriter. And now I have neither the 45 nor a recording of the tune, thanks to the Great Meltdown.

I can tell you about as much about Uncle Bernie’s music career as I did about Danny Kellarney’s. I can tell you that he was serious about breaking into the music business, and he may have been taken for a bit of a ride by his publishing house. I can tell you he and my mother’s sister, Aunt Anita, didn’t get along so well, and they divorced in the 1960s, when Roman Catholics just did not do that. I remember that people always whispered the word “divorce” whenever it came up regarding Aunt Anita.

But Uncle Bernie was a good guy. His two children, my cousins Chip (Bernie Jr.) and Kathy, were good to me. Chip was murdered in his home in Gary, Indiana in the 1980s, and that is the biggest externally produced tragedy in my family.

Does anyone have a copy of Uncle Bernie’s song? I’d love to have it.

For now, take a listen to Danny Kellarney’s other tune. He also recorded “Never Til Now”/“You Opened Up My Heart” (Fraternity 785), but that one never made it into the bins where my Uncle Tom shopped for the 45s he bought me at twenty to a dollar.

After this dose of obscurity, look for a couple of weeks of homages to personal favorites of significant musical fame whose 45s happened to join my collection when I was a tot. See you Wednesday!

Danny Kellarney, You Can't Fool an Angel mp3

Masaru Wada, Don’t Be Cruel sample mp3

You Can't Fool an Angel label jpg

Those Annoying Deadly Sins

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

If you’ve gotten into the groove of this blog, you know I am mixing some known songs with real obscurities. (If you’ve discovered me late, you may want to read from the beginning on January 2, as the posts build on each other to some degree.) Today’s post is the first really tough essay I’ve had to write.

It’s a strain for two reasons. The first is that the artist is a true unknown. The second is that I didn’t like the songs on the single when I was a kid, and they haven’t aged well. Part of the fun for me, though, is knowing that I am disseminating information that only one in ten million of you has ever discovered before.

I mentioned previously that in the 1960s I owned several 45s on the Mercury label, and a few from Specialty, Imperial and Hi, though those all came from one artist per label. Another successful indie label, Fraternity, made it into my collection just once. Fraternity Records, despite having hit records from the likes of Cathy Carr, Jimmy Dorsey and Bobby Bare, was capable also of delivering such product as “Jealous” by Danny Kellarney, Fraternity 783 (1957).

There’s nothing wrong with Kellarney’s voice, which sets him apart from a few of the artists I’ll discuss later in the year. But three-year-old caithiseach put the other side of this 45 (to be profiled Saturday) on the turntable one day, listened to a few seconds of the yawner of a chorus and orchestra, and yanked it. I don’t know if I ever played the A side, “Jealous.” I don’t remember it from my childhood, and since the 45 managed to fall prey to the Great Meltdown in 1972, I couldn’t play the song as an adult to see if I liked it. Frankly, I don’t know how this 45 got stacked high enough in the box of 45s to be melted by the sun, but it warped, and I tossed it.

Once I replaced the 45 a couple of years ago, I got the impression that I hadn’t missed much. The song is very much a product of its time and its label: orchestra plus electric guitar, vocal chorus and everything that a three-year-old dislikes in a song. Nowadays I would have to say that I have heard worse recordings, and I’ll even share some via this blog, but “Jealous” is not a tune I play often.

If the recorded song is not very interesting, the back story is a bit better. The song was written by Tommie Malie, Dick Finch (1898-1955) and Jack Little (1899-1956). Malie registered just 18 titles with ASCAP, Finch just 5, but Little composed 95 tunes, including “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town.” He had tunes covered by artists as disparate as Jimmy Durante and Fletcher Henderson.

Little got some of his work into the movies. “Jealous” showed up in a 1941 film, The Feminine Touch, starring Rosalind Russell and Don Ameche, and also in Somebody Loves Me (1952), starring Betty Hutton. The song was very appropriate for The Feminine Touch, as the plot concerned a jealous husband. But the song was written in 1924, so the writers got lucky by its inclusion in the film.

“Jealous” was a #3 hit for Marion Harris in 1924, and Ben Selvin’s version reached #13 the same year. The Andrews Sisters took it to #12 in 1941. Cab Calloway and Jimmie Lunceford both recorded it, probably around 1941, though I can’t confirm the date. Les Paul & Mary Ford sang it later as well.

A figure of considerable notoriety connected with this recording is the orchestra leader, “Dom Frontieri.” With his name spelled correctly, you may recognize Dominic Frontiere (born 1931) as the composer to the theme from The Outer Limits. He composed music for the TV shows Branded, The Flying Nun and Rat Patrol, among others, as well as the score for Clint Eastwood’s Hang ’Em High, which was a Top Ten hit for Booker T. and the MG’s in 1968-69.

In 1980, Dominic’s ex-wife, Georgia Frontiere, the owner of the Los Angeles Rams (who died on January 18, 2008), gave him some tickets to that year's Super Bowl. He scalped them. The big problem was that she gave him 16,000 tickets, and he made half a million dollars from the sales. Oopsies, he forgot to report the income to the IRS, and he did nine months for his bad memory.

It would be intriguing to learn why the people involved in the Kellarney recording decided to resurrect this song, which didn’t even chart during its second film life. The Kellarney trail is pretty cold, though I have one tidbit to follow up before Saturday. I am going to hope one of my readers has a clue to warm up the trail again. Let me know.

For my amusement, please consider taking the opinion poll on this song. (It’s off to the right.) See you on the flip side Saturday!

Sources: IMDB, Wikipedia

Danny Kellarney, Jealous mp3

"Jealous" label

Fraternity Records sleeve

Summertime After Dark

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

When I was five years old, I was not a very discriminating listener. That’s why half of the 45s my Uncle Tom bought for me didn’t get dumped in the trash. I’d like to think I was open-minded and saw value in everyone’s attempts at musical expression. My keeping all the 45s I received as gifts doesn’t mean I gave them all equal playing time, though.

The B side of Epic 45 5-9299, “When the Sun Goes Down” by the Jamies, struck five-year-old caithiseach as a far better tune than the A side, “Snow Train.” For one thing, “Snow Train” was a winter song, and while I loved Christmas and making snowmen, who would want to play a song about winter in the summer? That was a dumb idea. And while trains were cool (my mother’s father was an engineer for the EJ&E railroad), what was a Snow Train? If the songwriter, Sherm Feller, couldn’t sell that corny idea to a little kid, how could the Jamies sell it to the hip teens who had found the saucy lyrics of “Summertime, Summertime” so attractive?

The hip teens ignored the winter sequel, of course. But I wonder what might have happened if DJs had flipped the 45 over and begun to play “When the Sun Goes Down.” Epic was big enough to work the B side of the 45 when the A side tanked, so maybe they tried, and the B side was also a flop.

“Summertime, Summertime” survived on a sparse arrangement (harpsichord and someone beating on a cardboard box with his hands), thanks to clever lyrics. This second single required a typical pop arrangement to attract what little audience it drew. I believe, frankly, that the perceived need for a sequel to the hit, and the route taken to create that sequel, doomed the Jamies.

Sherm Feller wrote “Snow Train” by himself. Apart from writing a song that had a lot in common with late-1950s Christmas recordings and thus was sentenced to two weeks of annual sales, the lyrics are not particularly evocative. Here’s the entire song:

Here comes the Snow Train!
(tepid yay from the Jamies and train whistle)
Snow Train, Snow Train, merry merry merry go-go-go train
Snow Train, Snow Train’s on the way
Up hills, down trails, stocking caps and flying pony tails
Snow Train, Snow Train’s on the way
Rain, rain, go away
Come again some April day
When you see the snow is flyin’
We’re all through with
summertime, summertime, summertime, summertime
Snow Train, Snow Train, rockin’ rollin’ ho-ho-ho train
Snow Train, Snow Train’s on the way
Key change and repeat all lyrics.

The song has nothing in common with the writing style of “Summertime, Summertime.” It has nothing in common with hit songs, either. That doesn’t make it a bad song, but it was never going to make anyone a lot of money.

The in-your-face rebellious nature of “Summertime, Summertime” made it a hit. Compare these lyrics, the first set from “When the Sun Goes Down” and the second from the hit. (I am tired of writing “Summertime, Summertime.” Sorry.)

“When the Sun Goes Down” (partial)
Early to bed and early to rise is what some people say
But the gals I know and all the guys, they just don’t live that way
The night was made for people like us who enjoy the finer things
We live our lives without the fuss that normal living brings

Come on, you sun, roll across the sky and sink into the west
’Cause I can hardly wait till I start living the life that’s best
When the sun goes down, I’ll be goin’ to town
Just to look around for you
Just to look around for you

“Summertime, Summertime” (partial)
Well shut them books and throw ’em away
Say goodbye to dull school days
Look alive and change your ways
It’s summertime . . .

Its time to head straight for the mills
Its time to live and have some thrills
Come along and have a ball
A regular free-for-all

Well are you comin’ or are you ain’t
You slowpokes are my one complaint
Hurry up before I faint
It’s summertime

Well I’m so happy that I could flip
Oh how I’d love to take a trip
I’m sorry, teacher, but zip your lip
Because it’s summertime

“When the Sun Goes Down” shows some of the liveliness of the hit, with the added feature of an internal rhyme in each phrase. Both “Sun” and the hit ooze teen perspective, whereas “Snow Train” is close to sterile in both teen appeal and Christmas validity.

The difference? Tom Jameson contributed his songwriting skills to both the hit and “Sun,” while he was absent from "Snow Train." An astute music detective might hypothesize that the hit was mostly written when Sherm Feller discovered the Jamies, and that “Sun” was mostly the work of the writer who gave the hit its cleverness.

If that hypothesis is correct, then Tom Jameson might have been a writing talent worth developing. As it is, he wrote just five tunes, four with Feller and one, “Evening Star,” by himself. That song’s lyrics would be a key to deciding who was the bold lyricist of the pair, but to be fair, I would also have to examine a number of Feller’s solo composition (42 total registered works). So far, I haven’t been able to gain access to other songs by either songwriter, so I hope to revisit the topic sometime this year.

I’m not knocking Sherm Feller’s legacy. It would make more sense (in the way things were done then) for the unestablished writer (Jameson) to give some credit for minor tweaks on a song to Feller, rather than Feller adding Jameson to the song’s writing credits out of kindness. Keep in mind that I am speculating on the song's authorship and could be completely wrong.

Now, take yourself back to a time in your personal music history when everything was new, and what was good was what you liked and not only what Rolling Stone endorsed. The Jamies, with their innocently broad Dorchester accent, seem to be having fun on this side. Listen to the song, and be sure to comment!

Next week, I’ll look at an artist who really is obscure. See you then, and thanks for reading.

Jamies, When the Sun Goes Down

When the Sun Goes Down label

Summertime? Summertime?

Now that this blog is developing a history, it’s time to update an open issue: the Mystery 45 has not yet been named. I’ll give it a couple more weeks, then it will be time to shop the recordings around to pop musicologists. Doesn’t someone here want the honor of having solved a 40-year-old mystery? I know you can do it . . .

I’d like to note as well that I was pleasantly surprised at the positive reception the Five Whispers tunes earned. Comments both on the blog and via email show both sides to be listenable, and so I’m glad I hunted down a copy of the 45. Thanks for caring about the music. Today’s song is another true obscurity. Here we go.

When the Great Meltdown took two-thirds of my 45s away from me, one of the non-aerodynamic Frisbees I remembered well was by a band I thought I had never heard before. By the time of the Meltdown, though, I was hearing this vocal group a lot on WIND in Chicago, the oldies station my stepmom played in the car.

The group was the Jamies. Ah! Of course. “Summertime, Summertime.” It hit #26 in 1958 and #38 in 1962. Are they a One-Hit Wonder? Is their second foray into the Top 40 a One-Week Wonder? There is an awful lot of music philosophy wrapped up in the chart history of the Jamies.

The history of the discovery of the Jamies is wrapped up in a lot of music philosophy as well. Skip this story if you’ve heard it. If not, it’s a good read.

Tom Jameson and his sister, Serena of Dorchester, Massachusetts, formed a church quartet with Jeannie Roy and Arthur Blair. A Boston DJ, Sherm Feller (1918-1994), heard them sing, and he worked up a ditty with Tom Jameson that they called “Summertime, Summertime.” Some of you will know that Sherm Feller was the Boston Red Sox PA announcer for 26 years. (See http://www.shermfeller.com/.)

The Jamies recorded a demo of “Summertime, Summertime,” and Feller took it to Cadence Records. The label head, Archie Bleyer, played it for his kids, and they liked it enough that he brought the Jamies into the studio. Unimpressed with the results, he threw away the tape in Sherm Feller’s presence. Feller offered to buy it from him, but Bleyer told him to take it. No charge.

Feller took it across the street to Epic, and they snapped it up. Despite a late release in July, this first of all summer songs sold 250,000 copies. If you listen to anything other than a pure hip-hop station, you will run into this tune every year during months with no R in them.

So, how could Archie Bleyer, who signed the Chordettes, the Everly Brothers and who knows how many other harmony-laden acts, decide to pass on a song his kids loved? How did Epic Records give Sherm Feller a $2000 advance without even seeing the singers? It’s quintessential music business: this hit-and-miss approach has ruled the labels, and the airwaves, for decades. Just think what music you might have heard if every decision were the right one. By the same token, think about what songs you would not have been subjected to. After all, there would have been no “Ice, Ice Baby” if the labels didn’t pump out the occasional plagiarized retread.

With the big summer hit under their belt and winter approaching, the industry philosophy said: “Sequel!” And so it was. The Jamies recorded “Snow Train” (written by Feller) and “When the Sun Goes Down” (Feller/Jameson) for Epic 45 5-9299 in 1958. How big was the splash?

The splash was about the same as the difference between jumping into a pool and into a snowbank. No Top 40 activity for “Snow Train.” Not even Hot 100 activity. The 45 reached my collection precisely because it tanked; my copy sat somewhere for five years, and Uncle Tom got it for a nickel in 1963. But three-year-old caithiseach, like Archie Bleyer’s kids (his wife was Janet Ertel of the Chordettes, and his daughter, Jackie, married Phil Everly), found the Jamies’ perky tunes worth a number of spins. I listened to the flip side (wait till Saturday) a lot more often, but I didn’t think “Snow Train” was too bad back then.

Was “Snow Train” really a sequel? Considering that Feller wrote a cascading break of “Summertime, Summertime, Summertime, Summertime” into the song, yes, it was a sequel. Should the kids of America have given it more attention? The lyrics are more repetitive of the theme words and far less saucy than those of “Summertime, Summertime.” I would even venture a guess that the younger Tom Jameson wrote the best bits of the Jamies’ big hit, and Feller couldn’t quite match the tone in “Snow Train.” I may well be wrong about that lyrical dynamic, of course, but I have reasons for my opinion, which I will discuss Saturday.

Give it a listen, and let me know if you would have bought “Snow Train” or even played it when you were a kid. I’m about the only kid who did play it. I even remembered it for 34 years after the Great Meltdown until I could find a replacement copy. See you Saturday on the flip side!

Confirming source for this post: www.onehitwondercentral.com

Jamies, Snow Train

Snow Train label with Epic sleeve

Mercury Rules!

(Versión en español: http://granfusion.blogspot.com/)

Of the 300 singles I owned before the Great Meltdown, I can recall four that boasted the Mercury label. That seems like a small number for such a successful label, but remember that most of my 45s were cutouts. I had a couple of dozen records that screamed “DJ copy—Not For Sale” and several more that had small holes punched through the label, a sure sign that everyone had given up on that release. When your record collection consists of 45s on these labels: Enjoy, Gardenia, Lucky Four and IRC, owning four on one major label does mean something. The only labels that represented a greater portion of my collection were Specialty and Imperial, thanks to Little Richard and Fats.

When I was two (years old, not a conjoined twin), I knew I had two Mercury 45s from my parents. The silver/black logo on the Mercury label appealed to me, and I asked my dad who Mercury was. He gave me a quick explanation of Roman mythology and mentioned that Mercury had appeared on the dime before Roosevelt. Since coins were another interest of mine then, I started hoping I would see a Mercury dime soon. It was several years before one turned up in my dad’s change.

I acquired at least two more Mercury singles via Uncle Tom: a Brook Benton 45 that melted, its title forgotten, and a Ray Stevens single I will feature as Halloween approaches. I discussed one Mercury single, “The Stroll,” last time, and now it’s Patti Page’s turn.

This is my third straight post about a song that got significant airplay, so you’ll be wondering if I really own obscure music, as I claim. This blog is primarily about the stories behind my 45s, and a very few of the stories synch up with Top 40 hits. I can promise you the next 45 will be one you almost certainly have never heard on the radio.

You do all know Patti Page, don’t you? Well, just in case: She was born Clara Ann Fowler in 1927, into a poor Oklahoma family. At age 18, she took the job of singing as Patti Page on a Tulsa radio show sponsored by Page Milk; every previous singer on that show had been called Patti Page. Unlike the others, she took the name with her when she was discovered by Jack Rael. When she recorded “Confess” in 1947, Rael dubbed her voice a second time to save hiring another singer. And since people didn’t figure out that she was singing harmony with herself on her songs, she was sometimes credited as “Vocals by Patti Page, Patti Page and Patti Page.” “Tennessee Waltz” was #1 for 13 weeks in 1950-51. She was the best-selling female artist of the 1950s. She acted a significant role in Elmer Gantry in 1960.

At some point in early 1957, my mother bought “Mama from the Train,” Mercury single 70971. The song was written by Gordon Irving (1915-1996), who also composed “Unforgettable,” twice a hit for Nat “King” Cole. The song, about a woman from the Old Country whose syntax caused her daughter some nostalgic amusement, included the phrase “Throw Mama from the train a kiss, a kiss.”

Well, two-year-old caithiseach heard only “Throw Mama from the train” before he lost it. I wasn’t the only person to hear the sinister double-entendre; the movie Throw Mama from the Train owes its title to this song. But when you’re two, and your mother is sitting right there, and a song you’re playing is talking about throwing Mama from the train, who wouldn’t start bawling?

Maybe you wouldn’t cry, but I did. Every time I played the song, I cried. Why didn’t I stop playing the song? That’s what my mom wanted to know. So, the final time I played it, as I sat on the floor by the record player, weeping at the tragedy of the senseless murder, she leaned over me, hands on her knees, and intoned in a creepy voice, “I’m Mama from the Train.”

Oh, did I get mad at that. Part of it was the humiliation of having my feelings mocked, but part of it was that she scared me nearly to death by raising the specter of her actual demise. Looking back, I think I always felt that she was ephemeral in my life, a visitor who had come to give me life and get me started before going away. And she did go away, when I was nine. After ten months of illness, she ceased to struggle and died on January 10, 1970.

When she came at me with that spooky voice, I frowned and said, “I’m going to throw this record away.”

She smirked and said, “Go ahead.”

I snatched it off the turntable and marched into the kitchen. At the end of the counter we had a small square silver garbage can with a foot pedal. I stepped on the pedal. In my memory I can still see the scraps from dinner, potato peelings lying atop other garbage. I stood there, waiting for her to rescue me from my stubbornness. She didn’t come to tell me I was being silly. My dad didn’t come to tell me I was going to regret it. I dropped the 45 on the pile of garbage. I looked at it. No one came. I took my foot off the pedal, and the lid dropped. And that was that. No one reproached me, but no one told me to get the record back. I think they were done with the bitter sobbing over the fate of poor Mama, lying in a heap on the railroad tracks.

In 1983, I started to think about the song again. I finally went to the record store and sifted through the Patti Page albums until I found one with “Mama from the Train” on it. I took it back to my apartment, steeled myself, and dropped the needle on the vinyl.

It wasn’t the same recording.

The 45 began with no introduction, and this recording started with strings. It wasn’t even in the same key. Exasperated, I drove right back to the record store and looked more closely until I found an LP that guaranteed me the original recording. There was no way I was going to ask the clerk to put that song on for me to check it.

This time, I did have the right version. As a test of my memory, I hummed the first note before I played the song, and I hit it right on. And as soon as Patti Page sang “Throw Mama from the train,” everything came back, and I wept, first for my mom, and then for the willful loss of a 45 that had linked us.

It took me a couple of days to realize that I had not heard the song for twenty years, not since I was two, and yet I remembered how the record should start and the pitch of Patti’s voice. Obviously, the song had entrenched itself in my memory.

“Mama from the Train” hit the charts on October 27, 1956, reached the Top 40 on November 3, 1956 and peaked at #11. As you listen, remember that no one is really throwing Mama from the train. Trust me, it will help you if you keep that in mind.

Patti Page, “Mama from the Train”