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
Play:
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
Play:
2 comments:
Two really weird ones! There are good things about both. I like the lyrics for both songs--they're out there and kinda ear-catching. Do you think that this is a Rodd Keith record? Thank you for posting.
This is from the HEART, MY heart... Rusty or a Dick, either one these here tunes are so fine, it's Earth shaking to think of the impact which unearthing & reviving these sides could potentially sway mankind into a metamorphosycosissical transformational catalyst which would mean, of course, that we are all going to Nirvana for Christmas! How neato of you, Robert, to find & share with us such wonderous, wonderful, liberating songs to shed the eons of our collective growing pains. Now, I can sleep at night. Rusty Ray is a lounge singer's icon.
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