A Big Disco City, A Self-Absorbed Man, and a Muslim Prayer

Recently, I was lucky enough to acquire another honest-to-goodness Preview Label album!!! While this one largely features Barbara Foster and Gene Marshall, it also boasts two songs performed by the mysterious Ace Mona. Whether this is the same Ace Mona as any of those who turn up in a Google search, including one who has an album for sale on Amazon, is unclear to me, but Ace does get to sing one of the more ridiculous song-poems I've heard in some time, on the "Singin' With Style" album.

It's called "Poplar Bluff Missouri is a Big Disco City", and it's just has half baked as that title suggests. For me, the first sign that something very weird is going on is the fact that on lyricist Claud Griffin's list of attractions that make Poplar Bluff (population about 17,000 in 1980) worth visiting (and, presumably, make it a Big Disco City), second on that list is the fact that it has a "New McDonalds"! It also has an Ace Hardware ("disco, disco"), some brand of food store, a 7-11 ("disco, disco") and "an Osco Drug store with disco". Based on the businesses in town, it would appear that any town with more than 10,000 people could probably qualify as a Big Disco City.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I do.


Also on side one (track two, in fact), is a Gene Marshall performance of a song blandly titled "Suddenly". That title does nothing to betray the (most likely unwitting) way the lyricist displayed the clueless nature of his complaint. You see, he and the Mrs. have had a lovely life up until now, but now she's ready to move on, and won't wait another moment. My point is this: the songwriter's conviction and self-assurances that he has never done a single thing wrong in any way ("so how can I be wrong???")... well, that might just indicate something about Mr. Perfect that might make him more than a little hard to live with...


And now, as a bonus, my favorite song from the "Singin' With Style" album, and the only song-poem I've ever heard that takes the form of a Muslim prayer. It's called "Insha Allah (God Willing)", and it's again sung by Gene Marshall, who gives the lyric exactly what it needs - this immediately becomes one of my favorite Gene Marshall vocals. The arranger did a nice job with the limited tools available to him or her, and the whole track is catchy, driving and appropriate intense. I'd actually like to hear this song done up with more than ten minutes of preparation.

It's Father's Day! What Ought Men Be Doing?

Happy Father's Day!!! - and happy Double-Nickles Day to me yesterday. I'm 11 for the fifth time, or at least that's what it feels like.

Today is all about Men, and in honor of all the men out there, here's one of my favorite singing men, Norm Burns, with a very odd entry into the song-poem archives, "Men Ought to Run Side By Side". As far as I can tell, lyricist Stella Greenhill wrote a series of unrelated verses, some of which seem to have no sense even within their own couplets, and strung them together with a chorus featuring nothing but the title phrase.

"Take all the flowers:
The roses are there.
I choose you now.
Isn't that fair?
Men Ought to Run Side By Side.
Men Ought to Run Side By Side.
Men Ought to Run Side By Side.
Men Ought to Run Side By Side."

Um, yeah. I enjoy this record - it's a nice sound (I generally really like the sound of Sterling 45's from this era), and I love Norm's voice. But really, what the hell is this song about?

As you can see below, I've transitioned over to box.com, at least for the moment. Their interface is either better than I'd remembered or has been improved. Not sure what will happen in the long term, as I still have hundreds of posts to restore.

The flip side is the awkwardly titled "babbling Brooks and Running Rambling Rivers". The lyric doesn't disappoint - it's made up of one mouthful of long, unmusical lyrical choice after another. Norm does his best with it, but it's certainly an uphill attempt, and seems most likely doomed to failure. If Norm and Lew Tobin couldn't do anything with it, I'm not sure who could have.

A Favorite Topic: Astronauts!

Divshare continues to misbehave, and if anyone has found a suitable replacement (I'm not fond of the clunky "Box" site), please let me know. Even when Divshare is "working" nowadays, you can only upload one file at a time, which is not a way to reconnect all of the old tracks on this site. Suggestions?

 

As has been pointed out many times before, the height of the song-poem business coincided with the Space Race, and as a result, there are a lot of songs about various aspects of that international contest.

Here's a label which is new to me, seemingly created for song-poet Jerry Thomas - Jay-Tee Records - no doubt (based on the singers) a product of the Globe song-poem factory, at least on this release.

I'm sort of sad that this astronaut record - "The Tale of John Glenn", as performed by Ken Richards - turns out to mostly feature spoken word verses, because the track is rollicking (and actually sounds like a backing track to a real hit), and the chorus has a dynamite tune and a memorable rhyming couplet:

In the global race from nuclear fission
He put his country in the ace position

It would have been nice for Ken to have pronounced "nuclear" correctly, but he's hardly alone in that. But how good could this have been if the verses were sung, and as catchy, as that chorus?

Ken Richards with Orchestra and Chorus - The Tale of John Glenn

Globe stalwart Kris Arden gets Jerry Thomas' other song, "A Happy Day's Comin'". This one doesn't do it for me the way the flip side does. The song is nothing special and neither the band or the singer seems all that interested in the material.

Kris Arden with Orchestra and Chorus - A Happy Day's Comin'