Sammy Marshall Fans Rejoice! It's a Full Sammy Album!

 Greetings, 

I'm still having trouble finding time to post, and it's likely September will be one of the dreaded "only two posts" months. But I gave you four tracks last time around, and to make up for the scarcity of posts again this time, I'm giving you TEN BIG TRACKS - and they're all on one album!

More about that in a moment. But first, the usual business about updating broken posts from what is now getting to be the distant past. 

We're all the way back to April of 2009! That month, I wrote a whopping seven posts, five of them song-poem related. These included a particularly ridiculous Mike Thomas entry, a Preview single featuring two different singers under the same name, the fabulously named Teacho Wiltshire on an early Tin Pan Alley release, an excellent early Rodd Keith record from Film City, and the story of - and contents of - the very first song-poem record I owned, which I acquired in 1976, with no idea what it was. 

At that time, I was also regularly sharing recent finds that were of the non-song-poem variety, and for that month, I shared a wonderful Louie Prima record (now readily available on Youtube, but I thought I'd be a completist), and a record I'd discovered by an obscure singer I love (and who I'd been featuring for some time at that point), Toby Deane - song record which is not yet on Youtube (that post's track is of extremely low sound quality, and I'm looking for the record in order to update the link with a better sounding file). 

Okay, that's outta the way....

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The AS/PMA site documents one album on the fairly horrible "Ronnie" label, and while this is not that album, it does carry the same title, "Ronnie Presents New Songs of Today", which seems rather redundant to me. I mean, "New Songs of 1913" wouldn't make much sense, would it? 

Anyway, this is a 10 inch LP, with five songs on each side, ALL sung by "Ben Tate", which is a pseudonym for Sammy Marshall (and yes, I know, "Sammy Marshall" was also a pseudonym - his real name is Marc Simpson). The album label looks like this for side one: 

I have to admit, were it not for the oddity and rarity of this being a song-poem album, and all by someone not known for albums, I wouldn't necessarily have chosen any of these for individual feature. They are, for the most part (some may say entirely) lifeless, dull, soulless, musically vapid and generally have lyrics which are about as uninspired as can be. In other words, typical Ronnie song-poem tracks. 

But sharing it is what I'm doing today, and here is side one of the album: 

Download: Ben Tate - New Songs of Today, Side One

Play:  

And here is the other side, featuring the two songs which I think at least have some oddness to the lyrics, track two, "Farewell, My Beloved", and the closing tune, "Do It Right"

Download: Ben Tate - New Songs of Today, Side Two

Play:

By the way, if anyone is interested, the same eBay seller from whom I bought this album has another copy listed on eBay right now. 

And here's the side two label: 

Tin Pan Alley Quadruple Play

Wow - it's been over two weeks since I posted. Things have been busy. Because of this absence, I'm going to share two 45's today, both on Tin Pan Alley. I think I'm actually going to try to post two TPA singles at least sometimes, when I feature TPA, because I have so many more singles on that label than any other, and because so many of them are good, weird, awful or interesting in some way. In an unusual side note, today's two singles contain performance from four different artists, including one of the rarest of things on a song-poem record, an instrumental. 

I'll get to the Tin Pan Alley festival in a moment, but as usual, I want to update you as to the old posts that I corrected today. The latest upgrades went to four posts from May of 2009, and included a song of Black pride, inexplicably given to Norm Burns to sing, some happy words from Rodd Keith, Cara Stewart and Sammy Marshall on a custom label out of Minnesota, and a typically awful offering from the mysterious folks at Noval. 

~~~

And now....

I am still at quite a loss for time as I type this, so I will be quite a bit less verbose and pithy as usual. You will need to get your fill of pith elsewhere. 

Today's first offering is from Lance, or rather "Lance" as he was always billed. He was not much of a singer, and this is not much of a song. It does tell a story, however, the charms of which (or lack thereof) I will let you discover, in this tale of a bad man in "Tucson". 

Download: "Lance" - Tucson

Play:  

While there was a lot I could have said about "Lance"'s record, if I had more time to type, I don't think, given the opportunity, I would have much to offer about the flip side, which is a rare offering by Nick Fontaine, titled "I Don't Care". 

I do enjoy the utterly incompetent edit at 1:23. 

Oh, and I once wrote a song called "I Don't Care". It was quite a bit better than this song, and even with that, it was still a fairly lousy. This song wishes it was as good as lousy. 

Download: Nick Fontaine - I Don't Care

Play:  

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Hey, Ernie, LET'S PLAY TWO!!!!

So who do you say is the worse singer, "Lance" or Billy Grey? That's a toughie. But Billy makes a good argument for winning that contest with his performance of "She's My Honolulu Baby". My favorite thing about this record is that someone, mostly likely at a radio station, wrote "NO" and underlined it, right on the record label. 

Download: Billy Grey - She's My Honolulu Baby

Play:

It's harder to fathom quite what was meant by the zero with an off center plus sign through it, which is written on this side of the label. 

As mentioned above, this is that rare bird, an instrumental song-poem, titled "I Cry Over You". There's not much of a melody here, 8 bars long, run through quickly and then taken through variations, with a virtually tuneless bridge thrown in the middle. 

As I always do with song-poem instrumentals, I wonder what the performers - in this case "The Candlesticks" - received in terms of sheet music or other instructions, in order to make this into a record. 

Download: The Candlesticks - I Cry Over You

Play: