A Texas Two-Fer

Today, we make another visit to the waning days of the great Film City label. This is number 4035 on the label, that label having started at #1000 and going to around # 4140, so this is late indeed. It's two releases up from Rod Rogers' great "Little Rug Bug", so there is quite the chance that Rodd Keith is also the Chamberlin master herein. And like several other releases in this numbering sequence, this record appeared on goldish-yellow vinyl. 

The singer is Jim Wheeler, about whom the less said the better, and the songs - both about Texas - represent a fairly rare occurrence in the land of song-poems, and that is, submissions by a songwriting team. Both of these song-poems were written by the same two-man team. Does that mean they wrote the words AND music (making this more of a vanity number), or just that they both wrote the "song-poem" lyrics. There's no way to know for sure, but these melodies and chords sound so traditionally "Film City-ish", that I'm betting these were traditional song-poem, with music by the Film City crew, and not a full submission of completed songs. 

The better of the two by a wide margin - better being very much a relative term here - is "Remember the Alamo". It is peppy, with a creative backing arrangement, a nicely structured "string section" solo and a lilting melody. And best of all, it doesn't wear out its welcome, ending in well under two minutes. 

But please, while everyone is remembering the Alamo, let's not forget that those fighting for America were on the wrong side of history: The battle at that time and place was really about trying to control Texas in order to allow those living there to have slaves, a practice that Mexico had outlawed. 

Download: Jim Wheeler and the "Swinging Strings" - Remember the Alamo

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I can muster up no enthusiasm for the flip side of this record. "The Beautiful Texas Waltz" goes on for roughly five days, or at least seems like it (it is actually just under twice the length of "Alamo". The word "dreary" comes to mind, which is unfortunate, as the song tells a happy story, and seems to have been designed to be a counterpoint to "The Tennessee Waltz", a song with a positive outcome. 

I'd also like to point out that both of these songs contain the weird feature - mentioned here from time to time - of songs which have a fade out, but then end before the face out is completed. Why fade a record out if you ended on a full stop? 

Download: Jim Wheeler and the 'Swinging Strings' - The Beautiful Texas Waltz

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Hitting On the Nurse

We're featuring Gene Marshall and his lovely voice today. The song has the promising title "Patient and His Nurse". Perhaps Song-Poet Harry Fineburg was writing from personal experience, perhaps he'd been watching a few soap operas, or perhaps he was just letting his imagination run wild. I say this because, to me at least, these lyrics seem to indicate the patient - who is heard in first person in the lyrics - is quite enamored of, and seems to be at least passively hitting on, his favorite nurse. 

Perhaps there is another explanation. Feel free to chime in. 

Download: Gene Marshall - Patient and His Nurse

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"All That Remains" on the flip side, is a wisp of a song and lyric. Both sides of this record are padded out to an acceptable length (for a 45) by having the chirpy background singers go on at length (as well as short periods of instrumental vamping by the band), and then having Gene sing a verse he'd already sung. This is egregious even in "Patient and His Nurse", in which we have heard all of the available lyrics at the 70 second mark. In "All That Remains", we've heard every written lyric by the 49 second point, and even WITH the padding, the record is STILL only 110 seconds long. 

Download: Gene Marshall - All That Remains

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His Body Don't Rest Easy

I prepared this post about five days ago, and then didn't post it. I didn't realize it until this morning. Sheesh. 

I had the following question from an anonymous poster regarding the Tin Pan Alley label: 

Was the Tin Pan Alley label exclusively a song poem label 

or did they also do vanity press records and bootleg reissues?

Thanks for an interesting question! Any answer I would give would rely heavily on the piece about TPA that Phil Milstein wrote more than 25 years ago at the AS/PMA website, which you can find here. 

In a bit of a summary, TPA certainly started off with more a "legit" feel than the other labels, using established groups and behind the scenes musicians who would go on to bigger and better things, and charged much more than the other labels, while turning out material several levels more "legit" sounding than many of their peers in the early to mid 1950's, but soon enough (certainly by around 1958), they dumbed things down, simplified their work and started turning out many of the weird records I've featured here. The label seems to have started with record 100 - by early in the 200 series, the silliness had already set in.  

A few of their pre-downgrade records (from the 100 series) fetch hundreds of dollars. This has definitely led to repro and bootlegs of those specific releases (I just sold one of those repros on eBay - even the repros are collectable!), but I have no information indicating that TPA re-released those themselves. I suspect the repro game became hot well after TPA ceased to exist. But this is little more the speculation on my part. 

I have not personally seen anything on TPA that is clearly a vanity release (i.e. written by the same person who is performing the song, which was frequently the case at another 1950's label, Fable). TPA tended to have a couple of singers in their stable at a time, and nearly everything during... whatever period you are looking at... .features those same singers again and again, rather than some outlier singing his or her own material. 

There is, however, one exception on that TPA discography website, one which is sung by the writer of the song, and one which has a completely different numbering system than the rest of the documented releases: 

PA 1101: Elmer S. Galloway -- Your Voice Is Like A Song / Take A Cup Of Kindness (both wr. Elmer S. Galloway)

So there's that!

And speaking of Tin Pan Alley: 

If anyone represents the idea that TPA stuck with the same singer(s) at length, it's Mike Thomas. Obviously, the song-poem website is mothballed, and having been updated in some 20 years, but for those records captured on the TPA page of that website, Mike Thomas' run of releases starts at # 538 (and I recently discovered he did a few, before that, under what I assume is his real name, Mike Yantorno), and then proceeds to be the named artist on every single then-identified TPA release until # 914. And at that point, a group called "The Melodiers" take over the next several releases. The lead singer of "The Melodiers" being, quite obviously, Mike Thomas. 

Anyway, here's Mike Thomas and the small, energetic TPA combo, with a song called "My Body Don't Rest Easy". I really enjoy the energy on some of these upbeat performances by this admittedly limited, but very peppy group. 

Download: Mike Thomas - My Body Don't Rest Easy

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The first thing I have to say about "The Flowers Came to Late" is that the band should have stopped and started over again after the guitarist got his instrument in tune. Aside from that, as in general, these guys are less interesting in mid-tempo numbers (especially when the song-poetry starts to get recited as it does here). I still enjoy the interplay of the organ and guitar here, in spots, especially on those lovely 7th chords transitioning the melody into another section, as well as the little solo at the end. And at this speed, they were still better than they were on the dirges that they sometimes had to perform. 

Download: Mike Thomas - The Flowers Came Too Late

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