Happy Birthday, America!

Howdy, everyone!

I have again updated a month's worth of posts, in this case, November of 2012. These include a Sammy Marshall "special" (with a few comments celebrating the re-election that week of Barack Obama - and weren't those the days?), a happy Rod Rogers record (and a comment on an unexpected death of a family friend) and two different Gene Marshall records - one with an otherworldly instrumental section played by flute quartet (or an imitation thereof), and one specifically shared for that year's Thanksgiving Day. That November was certainly a month of up and down emotions at our house. Can't believe that was almost eight years ago... 

Before I get to today's offering, I also wanted to offer up this rather amazing little newspaper clipping, sent along by Brian Kramp: 

Rod Eskelin, mentioned at the top of the second column, was, of course, Rodd Keith. Thanks, Brian!

And now.... 

We're just a few hours from heading into July, and towards a rather subdued version of our annual national birthday party, this weekend.

So what better time to offer up a song-poem written for the biggest of national birthday's anyone alive at the time can remember, the Bicentennial. And what better (worse?) label to provide us with a song literally titled "Happy Birthday, America" than Halmark. In this case, they turned to label stalwart Jack Kim - this is one of the relatively few releases on the label where they credit the singer - and then seem to have actually commissioned original music for the lyric, rather than one of them moldy old backing tracks.

I said "original music", but am I the only one that, after hearing the opening "Bicentennial! Bicentennial!", expected to next hear "men have named you", so similar is the opening to the old song "Mona Lisa"....

Beyond that, the song-poet seems to believe that the US has done only three things worth mentioning. One is the winning of many battles on behalf of ourselves and the for the freedom of others. Fair enough. The only other two things worthy of comment, apparently, occurred in quick succession in 1968 and 1969, and while impressive and wonderful, hardly seem like the only things a decent country would have accomplished in 200 years.

All I'm saying is, the song-poet seems to be sort of giving just a bit of short-shrift to America's accomplishments.


Download: Jack Kim - Happy Birthday, America
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A moment ago, I mentioned that it was relatively rare for Halmark to name their singers on the labels of their records. That likely has to do with the designs they favored, the most common of which list just the name and address of the song-poet, confusing and confounding record collectors forever since, at least those unfamiliar with song-poems - they tend to think the listed writer is the singer.

Anyway, perhaps they also shied away from listing the singers because they were so inexplicably bad at it. A remarkable number of Halmark records in my possession which do show a named singer, show the wrong named singer. Most often this is a male singer identified on the label of a record sung by a female singer. But I've also got records where the names of frequent label performers Bob Storm and Jack Kim are mixed up.

Now I've speculated that "Bob Storm" may not even have just been one guy, so different are some of the records released under his name. But people know who Jack Kim is/was - Jack Kimmel was his name, and his voice is very distinctive. I have records with his name on them which are clearly the man identified most often as "Bob Storm", and "Bob Storm" records labeled as being by Jack Kim.

In this case, we have Jack's wife Mary Kimmel, but the label says "Jack Kim.

That was a lot of text with nothing to say about the song. That's because the flip is an uninteresting, unoriginal paean to God, similar to approximately 549 other Halmark releases, and using one of those deadly backing tracks. It's written by the same song-poet as the a-side, and titled "Oh Lord Thou Art Powerful".

Download: Labeled as Jack Kim - Oh Lord Thou Art Powerful
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A Not So Standard Father's Day Song-Poem

Howdy,

It's been over two weeks since I posted here, and that's because I have been spending all of my blogging time constructing an enormous post for my other, reel-to-reel tape blog, commemorating my 60th birthday, which was yesterday. It's made up of various recordings I've made from age three right through a couple of years ago, with more than two dozen tracks in all. It is admittedly sort of self-indulgent, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime post, and I wanted to write an "I Was Here" post. If you're interested, you can find the post here.

It was also a bit more work than usual to fix the next old month's worth of posts, as I find that in December of 2012, I posted five times, including two posts containing many more links than usual. In total, the month of December contains a might 19 song-poems, plus a link to ten more at WFMU.

Because it was December, I chose to highlight Christmas songs throughout the month. And so it is that you will find posts featuring Christmas music from the Noval label, from Shelly Stuart (with Norm Burns on the flip), from Sammy Marshall, and an EP from Cara Stewart. Plus, two weeks before Christmas that year, I posted ten Christmas song-poems at WFMU, in a post you can find here. So, for a Christmas Eve post, I shared the flip sides of nine of those ten records (explaining along the way what happened to the tenth one), and that post is here.

~~

For today, I wanted to find something for Father's Day. So I looked through the various possibilities, and most of what I found were songs about dead fathers, except for one which was about talking to father about mother, who just died. Then I came across one where dear old dad is' not really the star of the song, yet is enshrined in the song title. And, as it turns out, the song itself is fairly funny, and goofily clever enough to be a good choice for this site, Father's Day or not. Here's the title:

Silly or weird song-poem titles, more often than not, end up attached to disappointingly average or poor song-poems, but that's not the case here. This is a charmingly silly lyric, and the band has some fun creating an appropriate music bed for it. But now, I'm going to shut up now and let you discover its charms.

Download: Mike Thomas - My Father's Jersey Cows
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The flip side, written by the same song-poet, does not have the same pull on me as "Cows", but even here, attached to a unimaginative, slow plod of a beat and band performance, there are some interesting, fairly left-field lyrics for a love song such as "The Dark Side of My Heart". Something better could have been made of this.

Download: Mike Thomas - The Dark Side of My Heart
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Big Irish Mike and The Fisherman

Hi!

Before I do anything else, I want to share with you a video that I made. Early in the shutdown, my church asked for happy videos - anything under two minutes - to send out to the congregation while we were alomst all spending lots of time at home.

My thought was to perform one of my favorite Ragtime pieces, a song I learned, by rote, off of an album when I was perhaps 16 or 17. As I say in the clip, I'm a sloppy pianist, but I make up for that in enthusiasm. And I've been forgetting to link to this client for two months now, so here it is. An added bonus (?) you get to see my charming visage and the rest of me, too. Click the link for the video!

A Ragtime Nightmare

I'm sure that was excitement enough, but I have also spent the early evening today fixing another month's worth of posts.. We're all the way back to January of 2013, so that's another year I've fixed!

That month featured a post featuring a classic Preview release owned by a friend of mine, which I identified as Rodd Keith, a statement which several song-poem fans disagreed with. I also shared a wonderful EP on Air records (featuring not one but TWO fantastic songs), two versions of the same song on an early Film City single, and a pair of songs with some interestingly odd lyrics, sung by Gene Marshall.

And speaking of Gene Marshall.....

Today, we have two interesting lyrics from the pen of one Myrtle Snow. I chosen to go first with "Big Irish Mike", a tale of Irish drinking, Irish brawling and an Irish punchline. Ho Ho Ho. 

Listen carefully to the story related by Gene Marshall: 

Download: Gene Marshall - Big Irish Mike

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On the flip side we have Bobbi Blake in her guise as "Barbara Foster", which Preview used on her releases. This is the tale of a woman who wouldn't mind her fisherman husband leaving her to go fishing so often, if only she didn't suspect he was fishing for something other than fish, and if only she didn't believe that maybe someone else was out there trying to catch him. This is a warm, inviting vocal, and she really sells the lyric. 

Download: Gene Marshall - My Fisherman

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