A Song Title For the Ages

Howdy, everyone, 

Well, last week I mentioned being short of time, and that I'd be brief in my comments. Little did I know how much time I would have starting the next afternoon. For one day later, I learned that, due to COVID's effect on my agency's finances, my position was being eliminated, effective immediately. After 29 years with my agency, I am out of a job, and this is the first time in about 40 years that I've neither been employed or in school. Hopefully, it will be just a hiccup in time, but who knows. 

Anyway, I have updated another three posts from way back in the summer of 2005. To explain two of the three posts, I should mention that, as I was flailing around for something to post, I decided to offer up my listening list for the month of June, and offered to share anything from that list on my site. My friend Michael asked for six of the tracks, and I posted them, in two posts. The first featured three tracks from a Latin flavored Percy Faith album from 1952, along with a detailed explanation of how I had known two of these tracks since I was a toddler, the story of my family's first reel to reel tape, which I've subsequently told elsewhere a few times. The other featured three moderately large hit songs from 1959 and 1960. All of these have subsequently become easy to find on YouTube, but hardly anyone knew what that was in 2005, so I'm fixing these posts to get this site back the way it once looked and worked. 

The other "fixed" post is one which was meant to be part of a series (which I never really got very far with), called "The Perfect Record", in this case featuring a wonderful Nordic-flavored record from around 1950, which I later also shared at WFMU. 

And now, for a title as unique as anything I've ever seen on a song-poem: 

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I try not to feature the same label - and certainly not the same singer, within two or three posts of each other. But when something comes this far out of left field, I have to share it with y'all. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I thought Ellen Wayne did a fairly poor job on the two songs I featured in a post at that time, while also allowing that she has been quite entertaining on certain, more "out there" material. 

And that's what we have here. with the bewilderingly titled "A Bellingham Playday Song", which immediately has become one of my favorite song titles ever. The Catalog of Copyright Entries shows that Edna Rice copyrighted this lyric in 1962, along with a song called "Bellingham Children". Bellingham is a city in Washington State, and I'd put money on it that Ms. Rice lived there at some point, probably when she wrote these lyrics. 

Okay, so I'll give you 150 guesses as to what "A Bellingham Playday Song" is about. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Give up? Well, it's about how much the writer loves Jesus, how much Jesus loves her, how mean the devil is (there's actually more text about the devil's meanness than there is about Jesus). Then there's a bridge section about Jesus as a child. 

Ellen Wayne provides her typical over-the-top, so bad it's good style, stretching out words so much that there are words in that bridge that I can't make out - enough of them that I have NO idea what the point of that lyric is. And those are the ONLY words in the song besides the chorus that I already summarized.  

And this may be nit-picky, but I also get a kick out of how this is "A" Bellingham Playday Song, and not "THE" Bellingham Playday Song. Like, maybe there's a whole series of Bellingham Playday Songs, and this is one of them. I'd love to hear the others. 

If they were still making song-poem compilations, I have to believe this would have been one of the selections. It would absolute have to be. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - A Bellingham Playday Song

Play:  

If someone out there has an insight as to what the title might mean, and how it relates to the lyrics, I'd LOVE to hear it. 

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The flipside is called "The Feeling", and it starts out great guns, with a driving piano/bass/drums arrangement, similar to several other TPA records from the period. To my ears, though, it doesn't sustain. The lyricist's work is all over the map. Within the first verse, the singer has professed her feeling that she and her lover will never part, AND that they are drifting apart. 

We quickly move into a piano solo, one which is marked by a few clams, and far less of the energy I felt in those opening bars. When Ellen returns with her vocal, she's now sure that she has lost his love. That was quick. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - The Feeling

Play:  

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And now, one of my favorites of all of the Cut-Ups I've ever done. If you are just now hearing this term from me, please check the last several posts, as I've explained what these are and where they came from a few times. 

By the way, if any of the inserts I've used intrigue you, and you want to know where they came from, simply ask, and I will answer, if I remember, which will usually be the case. 

I don't have much use for Lionel Richie's body of work, except for a couple of records with the Commodores and one solo release. But I think that solo release - "Hello" - is quite a good song and record. So it was a natural for me to chop it into bits and make fun of it. 

I think this came out quite nicely, and, as I said with a couple of my other cut-ups, this is not safe for work. 

Download: Lionel Richie - Hello (cut-up)

Play:

On a side note, you may have noticed the word "edit" on some of these cut up files. This is an indication that I've tightened up or slightly changed the original tapes, in order to improve them in some way.