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

Play:

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.