Minor Lance

Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um.....

With any luck, I think my hacking experience has been successfully addressed, but up until last night I still had to jump through hoops to put this together, so I have very little to say about today's offering, in order to get it out today and not have a one-post month. 

For a brief period in the mid 1960's, Tin Pan Alley utilized the dubious talents of a singer they only identified as "Lance", usually just like that, in quotes. If you click on the Lance label below you can hear all of the "Lance" songs I've shared (along with the songs by Lance Hill - a different singer - that I've shared).  

"Lance"'s extremely limited vocal talents are on full display on both of today's songs - his inability to accurately hit the correct pitch on more than a quarter of the notes sung is a wonder to behold. A random person off the street might well have done better. 

Each of these songs feature the sort of cookie cutter lyrics that make so many song-poems sound like so many other song-poems. But "Let Me Hold You To My Heart", at the very least, features the drummer's interesting choice of imitating a freight train in the last few seconds. 

Download: "Lance" - Let Me Hold You To My Heart

Play:

The flip side, "Lullaby of Love", starts with what sounds like a misreading: 

"I used to often wonder why.... how strange.... things were to me"

That just incompetent on every level. From there on, the song actually has very sweet, , if deeply formulaic, lyrics. There's only so much to do with such a poem, but TPA did it no favors with the barely present musical backing and a singer who shouldn't be in the same zip code as this style. 

Download: "Lance" - Lullaby of Love

Play:

Sugah Sugah

Greetings, 

Sorry for the half-month without posts. My desktop was hacked early this month and I'm still working on getting it fully clean. I cannot access some of the sites I use for writing this site and saving the files, so I had to wait to get everything together on another machine. 

Anyway, first, here is yet another vintage song-poem ad, with all thanks to Vinnie. I have no idea what company this may have been, or which of the two composers of "Dream a Little Dream of Me" chose to go the non-legit route. Probably the one that died from alcoholism (and not actually from falling down an elevator shaft). 

As I've probably said before, too many times, Edith Hopkins is my favorite writer from the song-poem world. The records she wrote are technically not wholly song-poems, as she clearly wrote both the words AND the music for her songs. But she utilized the song-poem companies.She initially worked with the existing companies, most notably Carellen, where she also appears to have aimed some of her songs for the legit market, including one of the best records ever made.

Then she decided to form her own label, "Inner-Glo", but continued to use the various song-poem factories to record her songs, primarily the Globe factory (although a few Inner-Glo releases do not involve song-poem outfits, and appear to have been aimed at the legit market). You can hear all of the Inner-Glo postings I have shared (including this one), here. 

Today's offering, 1962's "Sugah Tongue", from Sammy Marshall (identified here as Sonny Marcell), is not one of her best, perhaps, but it is catchy and bouncy and Sammy/Sonny gives it his all. This was also recorded some time before Globe fell into the soulless, repetitive that is heard on most of their releases.  

Download: Sonny Marcell - Sugah Tongue

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As an aside, I have seen multiple copies of this record show up on eBay (none of which sold, I don't think), and every last one of them listed the name of the song incorrectly as "Sugar Tongue". 

~~

The flip side is "Was Young Love Born to Die", which is rendered without a question mark. And that might be the most interesting thing about it. The lyrics are not up to Edith Hopkins' standards, and while the echoey production and Sammy's effectively emotive pleading are appealing, there's not much else here to like. 

Download: Sonny Marcell - Was Young Love Born to Die

Play: