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

Sax at the Restaurant

Today I get another opportunity to correct something I wrote. On Sunday, when I delivered my bonus post on “Washington Square,” I deduced that David Shire’s contribution to the composition was the lyric. Not so. Bobb Goldsteinn wrote the supremely visual folk lyrics himself, after his publisher, Duke Niles, told him that either Bobb would write lyrics for the suddenly successful tune, or Duke would find someone who would write them. So, after two years of sitting on the song, Duke was in a hurry. David Shire’s contribution to the song is far more tenuous than co-writing credits would indicate. If you missed that bonus post, scroll down below this one.

And now, today’s post:

There comes a moment in every audiophile’s life when he or she realizes that music is the absolute essence of artistic expression. I probably was figuring that out before I turned three, thanks to my passion for my parents’ vinyl, followed closely by Uncle Tom’s gifts of five-cent 45s. But as much as I loved some of my 45s, my first musical out-of-body experience came when I was at my grandparents’ restaurant, the Dwyer Café in Shoals, Indiana.

Sometime around my third birthday in May, 1963, we packed up the Oldsmobile and drove to Shoals. Later on we made a couple of trips by passenger train on the Monon Line, but I know this trip was by car, because it’s the trip on which my dad locked me in the trunk. It was also more than a year before we drove with my grandparents into Hurricane Cleo.

When we got to Shoals, we went straight to the restaurant and, as usual, something was playing on the jukebox. Though it would not take me long to score a nickel for my own play, I know I didn’t randomly punch up “Yakety Sax” by Boots Randolph (Monument 804). The song had hit the Hot 100 on February 23, 1963, and reached #35 in its three-week Top 40 life, beginning March 30. It was mostly a has-been when I first heard it.

The song didn’t climb high enough to make Chicago pop radio, and it was essentially a country song, but it didn’t make the country Top 40 at all. What happened when someone did play “Yakety Sax” on the jukebox was that I sat mesmerized for the entire two minutes of the song. My parents were used to that behavior from me, but at the moment they didn’t know I had experienced a couple of epiphanies at once.

I learned then that a stunning amount of joy could be crammed into two minutes of music. I learned also that the saxophone was an instrument of incomparable beauty. I announced shortly thereafter that “Yakety Sax” was my favorite song. I hadn’t said such a thing before.

Fred Foster, the owner of Monument Records, produced the hit version. Foster produced many Roy Orbison hits, and he co-wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” with Kris Kristofferson. As for the Nashville Sound musicians who played on the tune, I can guarantee that Floyd Cramer is on piano, but I don’t have confirmation of any others.

It’s almost unfair that I include “Yakety Sax” in this blog, because I didn’t own the 45 until I was a teen. But it was available to me for a nickel at a time on the jukebox, and I didn’t need to have a copy at home. I had it memorized and could recall it any time I wanted.

Homer Louis Randolph was born in Paducah, Kentucky on June 3, 1927. He learned to play a number of instruments but settled on the saxophone as a teen. When he got out of the U.S. Army in 1946, he started playing professionally. Chet Atkins hired him to do RCA studio work for the likes of Perry Como. Boots first recorded “Yakety Sax” on RCA 7395 in 1959, but his re-recording for Monument in 1963 was the hit. He wrote it with James “Spider” Rich (1923-2003), who wrote other material for Chet Atkins in the 1950s and 1960s.

Around 1961 Boots moved to Nashville at the request of the primary session men, including piano player Floyd Cramer and guitarist Chet Atkins. Boots was the first sax player on Elvis tunes, and he appeared on the soundtracks to eight Elvis films. He played sax on a couple of 1964 hits: “Oh, Pretty Woman” for Roy Orbison and “Java” for Al Hirt. His musical relationship with Brenda Lee included “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “I Want to Be Wanted” and “I’m Sorry.” For a bit of variety, he played the sax part on REO Speedwagon’s version of “Little Queenie.”

Boots charted three other Hot 100 hits, but that was the extent of his solo chart success. It’s clear, though, that his legacy among 1960s session players as an architect of the Nashville Sound is secure. You can see him as part of the band on Hee Haw reruns as well.

Active into his late 70s, Boots Randolph died on July 2, 2007 at age 80. Some 44 years after his big hit reworked my musical consciousness, the man who is responsible for the disproportionate amount of sax music in my collection was gone. I never got to see him play, but I did get to thank him for the song, and that will have to do.

At the Lake County Fair, in Crown Point, Indiana later in 1963, a band was playing in one of the barns. They would play any song for a dollar or so. My parents and I sat on hay bales to listen, and during one lull, I asked my dad to see if they knew “Yakety Sax.” They knew it, so they played it for me. And I asked for it again. And they played it, for another dollar. After the fourth straight play, my mom told me they were tired of playing “Yakety Sax,” so we would be going. I couldn’t see well enough to detect any looks of aggravation from the band, but they probably were glad to see three-year-old caithiseach leave the building.

I suppose that event was my revenge on my dad for locking me in the trunk of the Oldsmobile. As we were packing for the trip, I asked if I could sit in the trunk while he packed it. He let me do that. When he stepped away from the car, I pulled the trunk lid down till there was just a crack of sunlight. He came back and closed the trunk, and the sudden darkness made me scream. He opened the trunk immediately, but I have been able to tell people for 45 years that my dad locked me in the trunk of the family car. Or, to those using a British vocabulary, the boot of the car. That dovetails nicely.

Thanks, Boots, for the song, and thanks to all of you for reading. Even if you know the song well, listen to it again for the fist time. Note that you can hear the drummer (Buddy Harman?) pick up his drumsticks.

Next time, I’ll tell you about a Ground to Dust tune that I recalled several years later when I went off to summer camp for the first time. See you Saturday!

Boots Randolph, Yakety Sax

Telephone Time Tunnel

I had a bit of good blogging fortune this week. After I posted about “Hello Trouble” on Wednesday, I got a comment from someone who grew up in Shoals, Indiana. Eventually I learned that her father had serviced jukeboxes in Shoals for Sherfick’s, undoubtedly the owner of the jukebox in the Dwyer Café. This gentleman also worked for National Gypsum in Shoals, where my grandfather had the contract to provide security services. So, they knew each other from National and from the café. Since the man serviced jukeboxes from 1960 to 1963, he could very well have been the guy who gave me the 45 featured Wednesday and today. I don’t think the world can get much smaller than that, but this year of blogging is starting to churn up a lot of pleasant surprises, so we’ll see.

That paragraph was a news flash, and here’s another: you may note fewer loud thumps in this recording; that is because a regular reader, Yah Shure, gave me a couple of tips on click/pop reduction that doesn’t involve ruining the presence of the sound. The sound isn’t perfect, but most of the really bad thumps are gone. Believe me, if I could find another (cleaner) copy of this record, and several others, I would share them with you.

Now I’ll give you the original post I wrote a month ago. I have talked myself out on the Big 6 story (until someone comes up with new data for me), but the song brings other thoughts to mind.

Today’s song, “Can’t Hang Up the Phone” by an anonymous Nashville vocalist (perhaps the guy who sang “Hello Trouble’ on Wednesday), talks about how desperate the protagonist is to get his girl on the phone. He’s going to “keep on sayin’ that I love you to the dialin’ tone.” To the mind of current telephone users, the lyrics sound ridiculous. I am here to help you understand this guy’s logic.

Now, in 2008, people who have only a cell phone will not hear a dial tone very often. On a land line, I can punch in the number before I pick up the handset, so I don’t hear any dial tone there, either.

Even those who use a land line often know that, after twenty seconds (I just checked) of listening to the dial tone, you hear the recording “If you’d like to make a call . . . ,” followed shortly by the terrible screech that is supposed to wake you up if you fell asleep because of the sonorous A 440 tone that was massaging your eardrum. So nowadays this guy in the song couldn’t possibly say “I love you” more than a dozen times before the phone started giving it right back to him.

Ah, but it was not always so. When I went off to college in 1978, our phones at school, rotary dial and all, had a magical feature: you could dial part of a number and let the phone sit. It would not ring, and it would not cut you off. When I told a friend I liked Mary Ann Di*****, he dialed her number, all but the last digit, and told me to do that one myself. I sat there for ten minutes, sweating, wondering how stupid I was going to sound. I finally dialed the last digit, and her phone was busy. I didn’t let them put me through that again.
So the guy in the song had the same type of mechanical phone setup we did at Indiana University. It was indeed primitive, though not compared to the nearby Smithville Telephone Company, whose wires sometimes had been strung along pasture fence posts and were prone to being torn loose by cows who rubbed against them.

But our phone book did have a listing for Fone Company—see Indiana Bell Telephone Company. Same thing for “Phone Company.” I am not kidding you.

And so, first Stonewall Jackson, then the anonymous singer of my version of the song, sits waiting for the girl who just dumped him to need to call her mom for a recipe or something. And at that point, she will hear his voice, realize that she was wrong to let such a persistent suitor go, and fall back in love with him.

Um, nowadays we call that stalking, I think. Don’t try it at home.

But it’s a really good song. I had to do funky things with the sound file to get it to work; there was a fatal skip in the intro, so I spliced in part of the intro to the second verse to keep the song together. And where he says “caused my heart to break,” you will be able to tell that I had to deal with another skip. Sorry about that. If one of you has a better transfer than mine, let me know.

And that, folks, is what I can say about Big 6 Records. I was hoping I’d have space to tell the story about my grandfather and the hellgrammite he gave me to hold, but it will have to wait. I’ll be back Wednesday with another tune from the Dwyer Café jukebox—one you know. See you then!

Big 6, Can’t Hang Up the Phone

Label scan

Story of a Jukebox

My dad’s parents lived in Shoals, a town of perhaps a thousand people that ran on gypsum mining and farming. On Main Street in Shoals there was a little restaurant called the Dwyer Café, and my grandparents owned it. When we drove down (five hours by car once I-65 opened), I loved to hang out there. I cleaned tables, washed dishes, peeled potatoes, and generally prepared myself for a career in the food-service industry. You could ask if that was a good idea, but I promise you I have never asked anyone if they wanted fries with that. Whatever “that” is.

The other thing I did at the Dwyer Café was stare at the jukebox. Three-year-old caithiseach couldn’t get enough of this particular device. When someone ordered a song, a semicircular metal hook grabbed the correct 45, laid it on the platter, and the tonearm came over and began to play the record. My record player was manual, so seeing the mechanics of an automatic player up close never bored me. The tonearm also held a small brush to shoo dust away from the groove. I found that very elegant, and I asked for a brush for my first good turntable.

I played two songs on that jukebox a lot. One I will discuss next week, but the other one is legendary in my music collection. Uncle Tom didn’t get me this record; I got it myself. The song is called “Hello Trouble,” and it appeared on the Big 6 label. I will approach the story from the beginning, so you can see what I learned about the song as time went on.

The record was created to maximize jukebox record slots: it had three songs on each side, with very fine grooves. I had some EPs at home, so it didn’t surprise me to find a 45 with six hits on it. Something I never figured out, and still don’t understand, is how the tonearm could find the right spot to start the second and third songs. It was like magic; if you ordered “World of Forgotten People,” the needle dropped in exactly the right spot, just after “Hello Trouble.” And if you played “Hello Trouble,” you didn’t get the other two songs for free. If you know how this machine from the early 1960s worked, do tell.

I knew the jukebox man sometimes opened up the window and swapped out records. I learned to my horror one day that he was taking “Hello Trouble” away. My distress must have been evident, because he gave me the 45. As many times as I had played that song in Shoals, I could now play it a hundred times more often in Merrillville. The tragedy of losing the recording forever was averted, and I added a prized tune to the box of 45s when I got home.

From 1963 until 1979, I played “Hello Trouble” often. The 45 didn’t get Ground to Dust, because I had better needles then, but it got crackly, as you’ll soon see. The 45 went to college with me, and when I got a good turntable and an excellent tape deck, I decided to tape the song so I could retire the 45.

That was a bit of a challenge. The lighter tonearm skipped on the record. As I was determined to get this song recorded, my roommate Ray and I doodled with the anti-skate setting. I figured out that by moving that knob at the right instant, I could get past the skip in the guitar pickup notes, and then by turning it fully to the other side, I’d slip through the second skip in the groove. I got my recording.

Then I thought it might make sense to look for the song on LP. Since the artist was not listed on the 45, we had to guess at who the singer might be. Ray suggested Buck Owens, and at the local record store we learned that Buck had indeed recorded the song. I was hesitant to buy the LP without being sure, so I held off to await further data.

From 1979 to the early 1990s, I listened to my tape of “Hello Trouble” and didn’t buy Buck’s version. But when his box set came out, I couldn’t resist. Instead of being unable to pull the trigger on a $5 vinyl purchase, I dropped $30 on Buck’s box. I ran home and dropped the laser on “Hello Trouble.” And I’ll be darned if it wasn’t the wrong version. Way wrong, not even similar to the one I had loved for thirty years.

You see, Buck had his way of doing songs. I have made a medley of Buck Owens intros from the early days of his Bakersfield Sound, and you’ll see that it’s not much of a stretch to go from these recordings to a cookie-cutter-Buck version of “Hello Trouble.” But it’s not the way the song should have been done. Considering that I have heard the song covered later by the Desert Rose Band and others in the Buck Owens style, rather than in the original manner, I am a bit miffed still at Buck. He changed the chords in the chorus, for crying out loud. And since he let Wynn Stewart give him his break in music without giving back much, Buck and I are going to have a little chat in about sixty years.

So, having eliminated Buck from the running for singer of “Hello Trouble,” I bothered to do some research. I learned that the song’s writer, Orville Couch (1935-2002), had taken the song to #5 on the country charts, with the run beginning on 11/24/1962 and lasting 21 weeks. His version, Vee Jay 470, was not available on CD. So that search stalled.

But I went to Nashville to check out the scene in 1996, and in a store full of 45s I found “Hello Trouble” by Orville Couch. The store had turntables, so I dropped the needle on it, and . . . it wasn’t my version. It was far closer than Buck’s, but I suddenly knew what was going on. I owned six soundalikes of early-1963 country hits. The actual hits are:

Artist-Title-Peak-Debut
Orville Couch, “Hello Trouble” #5 11/24/1962
Unknown, “World of Forgotten People” Not a Top 40 hit
Kitty Wells, “We Missed You” #7 11/3/1962
Stonewall Jackson, “Can’t Hang Up the Phone” #11 1/26/1963
Unknown, “Safely in Love Again” Not a Top 40 hit
Porter Wagoner, “I’ve Enjoyed As Much of This As I Can Stand” #7 12/8/1962

All of my versions are soundalikes. Since 1996, I have been looking for a cleaner copy of this 45, but I can’t even get anyone to confirm that Big 6 Records existed. What I can say about the song is that, of the three concurrent versions of “Hello Trouble,” my Big 6 cut is the smoothest and most listenable. It’s the version I learned to love, it’s true, but the harmonica in the Couch version is far too sappy, and Buck took the song to Bakersfield and never gave it back.

One thought comes to mind. When Billboard calculated jukebox plays for chart purposes, Couch et al. would not be getting credit for the plays of Big 6 45s. That makes me think these songs could have climbed a bit higher on the chart were it not for this soundalike record. The same might hold true for songs that got the Hit Records treatment. At least the songwriters got their royalties. I think.

Speaking of them, Orville Couch posted 100 compositions with BMI, but none seems to rival the success of “Hello Trouble.” His co-writer, Eddie McDuff, shared credit on numerous Couch-McDuff composition. McDuff also wrote two tunes with Dorothy Barnett Couch, who I figure to be Orville’s wife. There’s not much more available on these guys.

And that’s “Hello Trouble” for you. Be sure to listen to all of the sounds, so you can see the complete picture. When I was three, I especially liked the line about letting Trouble “rest your shoes.” It was several years before I figured out that Trouble was a girl. I figured that out all at once, and I suspect this should be my theme song.

Saturday I’ll have another song from the B side, with commentary on the technology of the time. See you on the flip side!

Big 6, Hello Trouble

Orville Couch, Hello Trouble

Buck Owens intro medley

Buck Owens, Hello Trouble

Big 6 Hello Trouble 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