I have very recently picked up two records - the first two in my collection - by song-poem singer Joe Hall. His name dominates the earliest known releases on the Sterling label - a favorite of mine - and then disappears, never to appear again, around the time that Norm Burns shows up, with barely a dozen known releases to his name. So I thought I'd share this previously rather unknown warbler with all of you. To me, he sounds more than a bit like the latter day Film City singer, Jimmie Jones.
But there I go, burying the lead, all for the chance to put a joking reference in the title of my post. Because the real news here is that we have yet another "song-poet" who made minor changes to an existing song, and presented the results as his own. Granted, this is not the wholesale theft of "Nobody's Child", which was submitted to a song-poem company without one word changed, or even "Watching Scotty Grow", which was submitted to another company with the name of the child changed. (Those examples will be able to be found elsewhere in this blog if I ever find the time to fix the older posts.)
Because there are lyrical changes here. But a simple reading of the words to "Old Black Joe", and a listen to Floyd Davis' "Old Miner Joe" will show those changes to be largely cosmetic. I really have to wonder if Mr. Davis proudly played this record for his friends and said "listen to the song I wrote!", and if so, if anyone pointed out that Stephen Foster wrote nearly the same song more than a century earlier.
Have a listen!
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The flip side, featuring the truly unwieldy title "In the Garden of Home Sweet Home", is as clunky a song as its title suggests it will be. Not much here to make the song entertaining...
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4 comments:
Joe Hall sounds like Rodd Keith making fun of lounge singers.
Stu, speaking of such, have you ever heard The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's rendition of "Suspicion"?
Timmy, I'd not heard much from that reunion LP...but I went and listened, and boy, Viv Stanshall was such a great satirist.
I wasn't even aware of a "reunion" that they did, I was referring to their studio rendition, on the double LP: "History Of The Bonzos", which was released in'74, but since that LP was a compilation, all the songs dated back to the late 60's & early 70's. It was, of course, a cover version of Terry Stafford's hit single (1964). which in itself seemed to me as a imitation of an Elvis Presley type singer. There are a few versions of The Bonzos on youtube, but unfortunately all of those are a latter version, and NOT the version I am talking about... I agree 100% about Viv, he was some kinda nut, all in his own catagory.
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