Monday, March 30, 2015

A Hit for Sonny? Nada Chance!

Okay, enough is enough. I'm going to offer up the next few posts via an alternative hosting site until Divshare gets their act together. For now, the song titles are the links to the songs themselves. Left click to play the links, right click to download. I'll try to post a batch of songs in the next week to try and get caught up...



The Nada label seems to have been a vanity project run by Nellie Doud Allen, who most likely took her initials, added an "A" in the middle, and came up with a label name which translates from Spanish into the word "nothing", which I'm guessing is not actually the message she was trying to send. Note that her publishing company was "Nada Music" - equally uninspiring, no?

She even added a cute little poem about writing poetry, just below the label logo! For her material, she chose to send said poetry (at least in this case) to the Globe song-poem factory, where the singer best known as Sammy Marshall (here billed as Sonny Marcell), provided one of his patented upbeat, bouncy numbers. Ms. Allen wrote the lyric from a male point of view, and Sammy/Sonny sells it with great verve and élan. For 90 seconds.


Ms. Allen's offering for the flip side, "You Didn't Break My Heart", is right in Sammy/Sonny's other wheelhouse, the slow, romantic weeper. But there's a twist here, evident in the title - the wronged man in this case isn't having any of that heartbreak that his former beloved intended, now, is he?




Monday, March 16, 2015

On Hold.... again

Hi,

I wanted everyone out there to know that I have posts ready to go - one for last Tuesday and another for today or tomorrow - but Divshare has not been working for a week now. Yesterday, their home page finally came back up, but uploads still don't work.

I will make multiple posts in quick succession whenever Divshare comes back to life.

Bob

Monday, March 02, 2015

Roll Out the Belly! We'll Have a Belly of Fun!


Every now and then, a song poem song title comes along that is so good, or so ridiculous, or so inexplicable, that I have to share it, even if the record itself isn't all that good.

All that said, I think there are enough things about today's record to make it worth a listen or two, anyway. But how could it possibly approach the promises of a title like "Beer Belly Polka".

I do enjoy the stretched-beyond-reason rhyme of "Iota" with "Polka", and the fact that no one on Earth would hear this track and say that it was a polka record. And of course, Gene Marshall sells it like it's the next "American Pie".

Everyone Polka!

Download: Gene Marshall: Beer Belly Polka
Play:

The flip side is called "Darling", and contains lyrics just as imaginative as that title. The main attractions here are the way the staff writers at Preview strung those not-particularly-musical lyrics into a haphazard melody, and the way that Gene Marshall - no doubt sight reading - still managed to make it sound like those notes were supposed to be strung together, and that he knew where the melody was going.

Download: Gene Marshall: Darling
Play: 3