Happy New Year, everyone,
It's been almost three weeks since I've posted, and I suspect that there will be only two posts this month. I'm absolutely Captain ADHD, and thrive on keeping ridiculously busy - I'm pretty nuts when I don't have too much to do - but this last month has just swept my legs out from under me, with a couple of brief but intense illnesses, end of the year madness and work demands. I hope and intend to be back to at least three posts a month in February.
Thanks to everyone who has commented recently. I've received multiple comments on older posts in the last month, from a few readers who seem to be getting caught up on the site. Welcome, and thanks again.
During the last three weeks, I've had a couple of interesting conversations about the last post - the New Image 45. At the time, I had meant to point out that its label number - 1717 - was the highest I could remember seeing, and the highest by about 250 numbers recorded anywhere. I overlooked the records Sammy Reed has posted in thinking that there have been no such high numbers found until now, but still, it was clear that the label continued for far longer than I had expected, and a range of 250 releases, of which only one or two have been documented, is astounding. More astounding than that was the email I got from Sammy himself, in which he reported:
Looking at Tin Pan/New Image records on Discogs, I found out that in 1984, they used the QCA pressing plant, so from that year on, you can tell what years they were made, from the first number of the QCA code on the label. This means that "Pride"/"A Girl and a Guy in Love" was pressed in 1984 and "Lady Wildcat"/"Fortune Teller" is from 1986. My record "Still the Same", which mentions Andy Warhol's death among many other things, is in fact from 1987. My latest one, 1711, is from 1992. And the one in your latest post is from 1993!
So TPA was still in business until at least 1993. That's astonishing to me. They also seem to have stuck with the "New Image" band name for a decade, which is unusual for them too. Thanks for the research, Sammy. I am amazed.
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As I frequently do when I feature a record that came from the mind of Norridge Mayhems, I have to offer the disclaimer that I include him in this site, and label his posts as being "Song Poems of the Week", even though his output, prior to the late 1950's, does not technically qualify as part of the larger world of the song-poem. "Vanity Release" is a more accurate term, and, it should be noted, he had an honest-to-goodness band on an honest-to-goodness record label very early in his career as a songwriter and musician. But he did, extensively, use the song-poem companies for the last 25 years of his life, often having them re-record songs he had released much earlier in his life. And his story, and his records, are fascinating to me, so I include them when I come across them.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that today's featured record is not a song-poem. It features Norridge compositions (typically, one side is credited to Mayhams under his real name, and the other is listed as being co-written by his altar-ego, Norris the Troubadour, and Mayhams' wife), and appeared on his own label, in fairly terrible quality - like all records he released on his Co-Ed label, this is definitely a vanity release. And the second of the two songs is one that he continued to promote, sing, pay others to sing, and release, in multiple versions, for much of the rest of his life. If you want to hear more, just click on "Norris the Troubadour" in the labels at the bottom of this post. I find him utterly and endlessly fascinating, and hope you will, too.
Can I just say, I LOVE the Co-Ed record label.
Both sides are credited to Jimmie Miller, although Mr. Miller leads two different bands on the two sides. Interestingly, the label numbers do not match, and this first song, " 'A Wedding In May' Or a Funeral in June" (to use his preferred punctuation) was released with at least three B-sides that I've been able to find reference to. This particular one is a documented "upcoming release" in Billboard Magazine in 1949, dating it quite nicely. The A-side features Jimmie Miller All Star Quintet, and features a fairly brief lyric/vocal performance framing lengthy solo sections
Download: Jimmie Miller All Star Quintet - "A Wedding In May" or a Funeral In June
Play:
The flip side features Jimmie Miller and the Charlestonians, and as with the A-side, this record was released at least twice, with a different flip side each time. The song is "The Seaboard, The Southern and the A.C.L.", and as noted, he had this song re-recorded in other versions at least twice in later years. This very brief record is a slow, bluesy number, sung by a female vocalist, a rarity on Norris records.
And, as you'll hear, someone wasn't paying attention at the start of the recording of the master. I've only ever heard one other 78 that starts like that, and I don't understand enough about the recording of 78s to know exactly what happened.
