W. L. Horning Strikes Again!!

Today, I have a find which will no doubt be considered a very important find by a handful of collectors. And it will no doubt be considered extremely esoteric by everyone else. 

For those not in the know, I wish to introduce you to W. L. Horning, maker of some of the most astonishingly bad records in the history of bad records. 

If, indeed, you are not familiar with Mr. Horning, please know that he made two confirmed records under his own name, an EP of four songs, and an EP of six songs. One of the songs, Kiss Me, Kiss Me Baby, can be heard here, and has to be heard to be believed. 

But then, Mr. Horning took the backing track for "Kiss Me, Kiss Me Baby", sped it up, and made up a new song by expressing himself ("singing" seems like the wrong word") over the sped up track. Unfortunately, "Kiss Me Kiss Me Baby" is only 63 seconds long, and the new song, "Rockin' and Rollin'", is almost three minutes long, so he kept moving the needle back in order to emote over it so more. The results are truly one of the oddest things ever pressed into plastic - and off center, to boot. 

The great Darryl Bullock, in his book on the World's Worst Records, has written about Mr. Horning, and while this segment can be found online, I encourage you to buy his books, which are wonderful. 

In the late 1970's, probably after those records were made, W. L. Horning began utilizing the facilities of Sandy Stanton's song-poem factory, and sent his "songs" to Stanton for a more professional result, pressed up on the custom (vanity) Wesley Records label (Wesley being the W in W. L. Horning's name). When the song-poem website was mothballed, only three singles (and six songs) from Mr. Horning's pen were known to have been recorded, and a fourth record turned up as an entry on the 45Cat website some time later. 

Well now, all of you get to hear that record, as recorded by Stanton favorite Frank Perry, and the ever-present "Swinging Strings":

We'll start with a previously unrecorded song from the maestro (several of his Wesley releases were remakes of songs he himself had already recorded). This one is called "Sweet Wine and Women", and like everything he wrote, it has lyrics which are simplistic to the point of ridiculousness. 

Download: Frank Perry and the "Swinging Strings" - Sweet Wine and Women

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On the flip side is one of those recordings where Mr. Horning had Stanton's crew remake one of the songs he had already recorded. The Horning version used to be available online, but I've been unable to find it now. The song is "Summer is Gone". 

Download: Frank Perry and the "Swinging Strings" - Summer is Gone

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There's Nothing Better Than Salt!

Greetings, y'all, 

I am desperately late in posting something called Song-Poem of the Week. but in my defense, I spent nearly all of my free time in the past month writing a massive post (for my other blog) to honor the 100th anniversary of my mother's birth, which occurred last Sunday. The post is indeed massive - several thousand words, about 18 images and 24 sound files - and I understand if those reading this site choose not to dive in. But if you're at all interested, I'd be honored if you'd read it. It's a good story. You can find that post here. 

To make up for the delay, I have a record today which is most certainly my favorite new-to-me song poem in a long, long time, at least since I posted "That's the Life For Me", last May. It's a song by Sammy Marshall and it's all about that most important of subjects, SALT. And if you don't think that I consider SALT to be important, than you don't know me very well. 

What's more, "Salt, Salt, Salt" has a bouncy, fun, early '60's arrangement, a wonderful, ragtime style piano break (I am reminded, just a bit, of "Green Door" by Jim Lowe, one of my favorite records ever) . It also has really clever lyrics. In the early lines, the song-poem team that put this lyric together quite accurately identify many of the things that make salt essential, and accurately identify that one cannot live without a lot of salt. I know I can't. By the middle and last verses of the song, they are ascribing all manner of amazing things that salt will allow you to do, including making you rich and allowing you to patch up arguments. I don't know that this is true, but given how wonderful salt is, I wouldn't rule it out. 

Just an all around wonderful record. 

Download: Sammy Marshall - Salt, Salt, Salt

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The flip side, "If You Should Ever Say Goodbye", is what Billboard would have probably called a "rock-a-ballad" in 1961, which is apparently when this record is from. Sammy seems a little shakier on this vocal than I'm used to from him, and it's okay all the way around, I suppose, without being anything special. 

Download: Sammy Marshall - If You Should Ever Say Goodbye

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Please also note that this is the only known song-poem release on the Carol label. There is one more Carol release listed on Discogs, but that one is clearly not a song poem, and has enough things different about it that, despite the label logo being the same, I suspect the two records are unrelated.