Hi Old Mistletoe

 As the Christian Church begins Advent, in preparation for the Christmas season, and as the secular world dives headlong into what it calls the Christmas season, I thought it would be a perfect time to both share an EP featuring a couple of song-poems - one Christmassy, and one December-y - and finish off correcting my final posts (Christmassy, as well) from 2008. 

As it happens, I only made 13 posts in 2008 (just before I started this song-poem project), and more than a third of those - five of them - were in December, and all were Christmas related. Today, I have corrected all of those posts, and added a few additional thoughts to some of them. 

These posts featured: two wildly different takes on O Holy Night; another post featuring one song in a stellar arrangement and one song in a deliberately ridiculous setting; a party record about decorating from the 1930's; a children's record which has, in the years since, become my second favorite Christmas record of all; and a slice of life, Randy Newman-esque performance of a song which has, similarly, since become my favorite Christmas record ever. 

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Let me say in advance that I think three of the four tracks on this EP are pretty stodgy and uninteresting, but I do enjoy that fourth track enough to make it worth sharing. Plus, the Air label - which typically had the most mundane of logos - at one point used what I think is one of the best label designs ever, for any label, song poem or not. I've only featured that design once before, and it's worth sharing again: 

There's sure a lot going on there, all of it interesting!

A quick reminder before I get to the tracks, is that the Air label was some sort of Catch-All for other labels, frequently featuring the output of two or more song-poem factories on the same disc. I have no idea how this system came into being or why. 

Anyway, the first song is titled "Hollywood F-L-A", and is credited to Tony Markham. A quick listen indicates that this is a Film City production, complete with Chamberlin, and unless I very much miss my guess, that's the fairly awful singer usually credited as Jimmie James (or Jimmy James) singing. 

I spent multiple vacations in Hollywood Florida in the late 1970's, when a relative lived there, and the ponderous, energy deficient, and overall deadly dull presentation of this song matches what it's like to spend time there, pretty much perfectly. Presumably, the song-poet did not agree with my lack of appreciation of the town, and I have to wonder what he thought of this arrangement and performance. 

Download: Tony Markham - Hollywood F-L-A

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Next up, the song that is the reason I chose this particular EP. It's everyone's pal, Sammy Marshall, or, as he's listed here, Sonny Marshall, with a fun, bouncy, yet wistful song called "Hi Old Mistletoe". Sammy, er, Sonny is looking at the mistletoe and being reminded of his lost love. There's not much more to it than that, but the winsome chorus and the mixed group harmonizing with him make these 93 seconds quite enjoyable. 

By the way, the tape stretch (or whatever it is) at the 0:07 point is on the record, and is not a flaw in my digitizing of the track. Such were the high quality standards at the Globe song-poem factory. 

Download: Sonny Marshall - Hi Old Mistletoe

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The flip side of the EP features two songs by someone named Jan Snyder, a name that shows up only on a handful of known Air releases and on no other label (at least none documented at AS/PMA. I am admittedly not the best at discerning between certain of the female singers who pop up on song-poem labels, but I don't Jan Snyder's voice is one that I've heard much, if at all. If she sang under another name, I don't know what it is. 

And..... I can find little remotely good or interesting to say about these two bland and uninteresting songs/performances. These remind me of the ultra-vacuous sound of the Ronnie label, but in saying that, I recognize that I'm not actually sure if Ronnie wasn't just an offshoot of Globe. 

At least with the last month of the year starting in mere hours, the first of the two songs is topical. I actually think something decent could have been done with the story told here, although those who produced this disc did not succeed in that way. Here's "December Love"

Download: Jan Snyder - December Love

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The final song reminds me a bit of those early 1950's ballads that were done using a single singer overdubbing herself  (starting shortly after Les Paul had perfected this technique, but with none of his talent, imagination or cleverness) . And the song itself, "The Turning Point", is about as interesting as one of those typical early 1950's pop double-trackers. That is to say, not at all interesting. 

Download: Jan Snyder - The Turning Point

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Rusty Ray is a Dick

Hello, 

First, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who will be celebrating it this week!

Also, I am continuing to slowly rebuild the early days of this site. Having completed all of the "song poem of the week" posts, I am now addressing the first few years of posts. Today, I have "fixed" two posts which each had a half-dozen offerings in them. 

One was a follow-up to a WFMU post, in which I offered up several vintage children's records, and a few others that I have known since I was a child. The other, from February of 2008, was in tribute to my mother, who had died several weeks earlier, and I shared several tracks that she recorded during her long career as a coloratura soprano, tracks ranging from 1944 to 1990. 

Now, here's a singer who was not a coloratura anything: 

Six years ago, I shared the only record I owned at that time, credited to "Rusty Ray" I stated that I did not recognize the singer as anyone who I had previously heard on a song-poem release, and, for that previous offering, that statement still stands. 

I have since obtained another Rusty Ray record, also on the Action label, but in this case, the singer is quite clearly the man much better known as Dick Kent. This is weird, because Action already had a name for Dick Kent, specifically, "Dick Lee", so why did they change his name for this release. And why, having done so, did they offer up an entirely different singer, seven releases later, under the same name of Rusty Ray. 

These are the questions that no one today has answers to. 

Anyway, the winner here has to be "Happy Hippy", which bops along with a Chamberlin approximation of a swingin' Holiday Inn lounge sound. If you want one writer's stereotyped idea of what a hippy might have said, in the early 1970's, this "happy go lucky" portrait will be your cup of tea, complete with a moral/warning at the end

Download: Rusty Ray (Dick Kent) and the "Singing Strings" - Happy Hippy

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A heavy, almost thuddish beat greets us at the start of "Jigsaw Heart", on the flip side, and that drum beat, heard throughout, sounds more appropriate for a stripper than what the words portray here, which is a wish for the singer's loved one to come back home. 

Download: Rusty Ray (Dick Kent) and the "Singing Strings" - Jigsaw Heart

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God Is My Co-Writer

 Howdy, 

And a hearty Happy Veterans Day and Thank You to all of my readers who have served this - or any - country. 

Although I have now updated ALL of the "Song Poem of the Week" posts, there are still about 50 posts from prior to that project's genesis, which I will be updating, rather haphazardly. I also suspect I will be deleting a few non-musical posts, those which served a minor purpose at the time, but are fairly pointless today. 

It also strikes me that, with the subsequent growth of YouTube, many of my early posts may feature records which were then truly obscure, but which now are readily available. I'm going to keep the posts up, anyway, and repopulate the tracks. 

So today, I have uploaded a handful of posts from 2008. These include a feature on one of my all time favorite singles, the criminally obscure "Jingle Down a Hill", by Gaitley and Fitzgerald. I also rewrote a post about the first track I heard from the indescribably lovely group known as The Sacred Heart Singers (I later posted an entire album by this group to WFMU). 

There's a post featuring both sides of a Calypso 45 (about Elvis) that I was enjoying at the time, and a track from the radio show "I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again" featuring the unlikely sound of John Cleese singing. Finally, at one point that year, I shared a song which made the lower reaches of the Billboard Top 100 in 1957, one which has haunted, amused and fascinated me ever since, The Silva-Tones rendition of "That's All I Want From You". 

Except for the calypso and Cleese recordings, it's a collection of some of my all time favorite records. 

And now, back to the countdown: 

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Last time, I posted a couple of tracks by Teacho Wiltshire, and a few days later, I got a great comment from frequent correspondent Sammy Reed, who commented that "Our Teacho, He Died in 1969". 

This was, in case you're unaware, a play on a very well known song-poem, "My Daddy He Died in 1969", which was available in trading circles for years before making its debut on one of the online song-poem albums. 

This in turn reminded me that I'd promised another frequent correspondent, Tyler, that I'd find my copy of that same 45, because it features perhaps that most outrageous act of plagiarism I've ever seen on a song-poem release. It wasn't in with all of the 45's I'd alphabatized some time ago, so I had to go looking. And I found it! We'll get to the lyrical rip-off after the first two songs. 

The first track is the aforementioned "My Daddy He Died in 1969". I have always found this to be a deeply ridiculous lyric, over-the-top by several steps, but many others have found it touching and even profound (the latter for at least one person I've spoken to about it).  For those who haven't heard it, I'll share it here, as it sounds on my copy: 

Download: Halmark Productions - My Daddy He Died in 1969

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Incidentally, my pal Stu, some years ago, took it upon himself to see if he could find  out when the man whose daddy died in 1969, had, himself, died. And he found out. That page led him to find "his daddy", which he shared with me, too. 

Next up is "Tears of Yesterday", which is tedium defined, nearly four minutes of yammering on over a track that is wholly without beat or feeling. And it's just keeping us from getting to the good stuff, anyway,

Download: Halmark Productions - Tears of Yesterday

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Okay, here goes. 

My comments are not about whether you, the reader are - or I am - a believer in any subset of Christianity. But I think we could all agree that someone who wanted to hear The Lord's Prayer set to music would almost beyond a shadow of a doubt be a Christian. 

And, being a Christian, that person would presumably know that The Lord's Prayer is perhaps among the two or three most famous utterances ascribed directly to the voice of Jesus, and that it has been credited to Him, in writing, for roughly 2000 years. And being a Christian, that person would almost undoubtedly consider Jesus to be God. 

So, in sending in Jesus' words to Halmark, and taking credit for them himself, what in the Lord's name was the good Dr. Patton thinking? What would many, if not most Christian faiths consider the act of claiming to have written The Lord's Prayer? I'm sure there are several answers to that question, but none of them are good. 

And yes, I know that there have been musical settings of "The Lord's Prayer" before. And I looked some of them up. They always say "Adapted by", or "Setting By" - in other words, the listed writer took credit for the music. And that could have been the case here, if this production was by any other label than Halmark. 

Because while some other labels did release vanity performances, and also had their performers record entire songs with music and lyrics by the unknown writer, Halmark always attached their vocal performances to one of about 14-18 backing tracks. And the possibility that Dr. Patton wrote music and melody for The Lord's Prayer and that it matched Halmark's pre-existing backing track is approximately 0%. 

As I said, I've encountered plagiarism on song-poem 45s several times, and featured it here when I've found it, but this is at another level altogether - submitting as your own work something you believe to be the word of God. 

As a side comment, please note that they used the exact same backing track for two songs on this EP. That strikes me as contempt for the customer. But then again, contempt for the customer would have been a good slogan for the Halmark people. 

Download: Halmark Productions - Our Father Which Art in Heaven

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The record ends with a rather esoteric lyric, titled "Mary Ann". The coy, indirect nature of the lyric here leads me to believe it was meant as a song about a shy courtship, although I may be reading too much into it. If it's not that, I have no idea what the lyricist was on about. 

But if I am right, then Halmark made a tactical error in assigning it to a female singer, in that a same-sex relationship was not likely what the lyricist was after, given that it was the mid 1970's, and that that song-poet had engaged with Halmark, perhaps the most conservative leaning of all song-poem outfits. 

If you have a different or better suggestion as to what's going on here, I'd love to hear about it. 

Download: Halmark Productions - Mary Ann

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