Fables of the Banana Queen for Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American readers, and a big THANK YOU to everyone everywhere who reads and listens to my posts. I have something extremely rare and also, quite entertaining for you today. It's a 78 RPM acetate on the Fable label. And it looks like this: 

My best guess is that only a handful of copies of this record were made, or perhaps only one. Certainly, this record wouldn't have been pressed in anywhere near the number of copies that a "released" Fable (or any other label's records, song-poem or otherwise) would have been. 

Happily, both songs are fairly delightful. I am guessing that these are song-poems, although with Fable, that's not a given - the label released plenty of records which were not. I'd be interested to hear what anyone out there thinks. Normally, the odd subject matter of the first side I'm sharing - "Banana Queen" - would be a clear clue that it WAS a song poem. Yet Fable released several songs of an odd nature which were probably not song-poems. So I'm really guessing. 

Anyway, this is a whole lot of fun. It's got a calypso beat, the sort of reverb-laden production that I love, funny and creative lyrics, and I would venture to say that it absolutely deserved to be released. But it does not appear that a release ever occurred. 

Download: Unknown - Banana Queen

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No performer is listed on either side. The flip side, "Baby You're the Best" does bear the name "Shirley", but as the song is sung by a male, that clearly refers to someone other than the performer. Maybe Shirley was "The Best". 

"Baby, You're the Best" is a rockabilly flavored number. It features a bass line lifted directly from "Don't Be Cruel", a "wild man" sort of lead vocal, with simple backing by a small combo. It's a bit too understated for me, but things perk up briefly on a couple of slightly more swingin' bridge sections.

Given the Calypso influence on one side, and the "Don't Be Cruel" influence on the other, I would peg this release from very late 1956 or some time in 1957. And since nothing, ever, has sounded as great as late 1956 and all of 1957, these are quite wonderful to hear.  

Download: Unknown - Baby You're the Best

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A Major Find - Cara At 78!

I have a real find for everyone today!

But before I get to that, a frequent correspondent, who I've mentioned before, Tyler, has made a real find of his own. Everyone first click on this link and read about an odd record on Halmark, which I shared nearly a decade ago. It features a song written by Halmark head dude Ted Rosen on one side, and a rendition of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", listed under the wrong title and no writer credit on the flip side. 

The songs were performed by Barry Craig, and I presented it as a real outlier, without any clear understanding of what its backstory might be - although it certainly isn't a song poem record by any definition. 

Well, Tyler has found this article. It is a profile of Barry Craig from MUCH later in his career, and runs down the high points of that career, including the fact that he recorded his first release for Halmark back in 1968 - the very record I posted. My guess is that makes Craig's rendition of Ted Rosen's composition either an attempt by Halmark at an honest-to-goodness hit song (unlikely), or a vanity release for Mr. Craig, who was given the song by its author (more likely). The presence of a hit song on the flip side indicates to me that perhaps there was only one original composition available at that moment. 

There could of course be another explanation, and I'd love to hear what people thing. Thank you SO much, Tyler. 

~~

As readers of my other blog may have read, I have been divesting myself of the vast majority of the 100-150 acetates that I've collected over the years, only keeping those that I really treasure, including my relatively few song-poem acetates. Some sell, some don't. 

I thought I'd listened to, and listed, just about all of them, but over the weekend, I found a small stack of acetates stored quite a ways separate from where all the others had been. And that stack was full of several that I bought ages and ages ago, in a few different purchases, with considerable excitement, due to their apparent content. Somehow, upon receiving them, I put them away and forgot about them, which is really not like me. There must have been something else going on in my life at that moment. This literally may have been ten years ago!

Anyway, the most exciting of them, to me, upon finding them again a few days ago, were two 78 RPM acetates sung by Cara Stewart, on a previously unseen label - "A Lee Hudson Recording". Lee Hudson obviously produced hundreds of song-poems, and often his name is prominent on those records. But these are the first I've seen where the label name contains his name. Even his AS/PMA page doesn't have any indication of records released on an eponymous label.  

What's more, one of the two songs is as winning a performance from Cara Stewart as you're likely to hear. The record looks like this. 

It's "I Just Dropped In to Say 'Hello'", and it is, admittedly, a wisp of a song, making it to 95 seconds only because a piano solo and a repeat of the bridge and chorus are tagged on - without those, the song probably would barely break a minute. But I LOVE this. Was anyone in the song-poem world ever better than Cara is here? 

The credit to a team of writers (Dick Felt and Ross Hollowell, on both sides of the 78) indicated to me that perhaps this was a professional songwriting team, but an internet search has turned up nothing. 

Download: Cara Stewart - I Just Dropped In to Say "Hello"

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These are obviously demos, what with just the piano and vocal, and also obviously acetates, as the  auditory damage apparent on the flip side, "The Biggest Fool in Town" will make clear. 

But this is the far less interesting of the two, to me, so at least the damaged side is the right one. 

Oh, and this record came to me with a lead sheet for "The Biggest Fool in Town" which is reproduced below, as well. 

Download: Cara Stewart - The Biggest Fool in Town

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Don't Drink and Drive

Howdy, 

Vintage song-poem ads will return next!

I will however, provide a link to something wonderful. Sammy Reed has posted downloadable and playable links to 23 tracks from earlier in this site's history, all of them dating to those posts where my own links were lost, due to the downfall of DivShare. You can visit that post here. Thanks, Sammy! I do hope to repopulate this site at some point, but something else always takes me away from that project

I have never featured the "Promo Records" label before today, and so am correcting that oversight today with a most appropriate ditty. I own perhaps 18 or so of this labels' records, and this is the first one which caught my ear enough to say "you have to share this right away".

Like the Halmark and Noval labels, Promo records did not name their performers, and indicated the budget nature of their work even further by simply typing the song titles and lyricist's names on a generic, un-numbered label. These were also not "records" as are typical shared here, but are more accurately described as Acetates, and one-sided ones at that. (Although I am sharing two songs here, they are not both sides of one record, but two separate records.)

About half of the Promo Records acetates I own were written by Mable Rowlett, and were purchased at the same time, in a bundle. "I Saw a Crash On the Highway" is clearly the outstanding number from the bunch. The phrasing of that title, and the lyrics of some of the verses of the song are all curiously indirect, given that the lyrics make it clear that the narrator of the song caused the crash, which involved fatalities, and that the cause was drinking and driving.

On this New Year's Eve, I hope everyone takes Mabel's lyrics to heart.

Download: No Artist Named: I Saw a Crash on the Highway
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For comparison sake, here is another Mabel Rowlett offering from the Promo Records label, a much more typical number, on a religious theme, titled "On This Mountain".

Download: No Artist Named: On This Mountain
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

A National Songwriters Guild Acetate

First up, yet another song-poem related ad, many thanks to Pete! This one a generic, straight to the point for lyrics and songs, from way back in 1935:

 

 

And now, here's something a bit unusual:  

 

Here we have an acetate from the National Songwriters Guild organization. This label was associated with the much larger Tropical label, and the more often fairly interesting Carellen label. Read all about it here (with more information on the Tropical page, to which that page links). many of the known National Songwriters Guild records are unnumbered acetates.

And I zoomed out a bit on the label scan of this one so that you can see the decrepit condition of this record, which will be confirmed when you hear it, particularly the other side of the record. There are no artists listed here, just the lyricist (same person on both sides), and I'm particularly amused by the incompetence displayed on "There is No Ending".

There is a sing-songy nature to the rhyme scheme, where the easiest and most obvious rhyme is grabbed 90% of the time - you can guess what word is coming next. The exception is my favorite word use, in which that lyricist, having discovered that "ending" rhymes with "pending", uses that word, one that does not occur often in song lyrics, and which (to my ears) keeps on drawing attention to its use, and the lazy quality of the lyric writing that causes it to be there. That's how I reacted, anyway.

Download: No Artist Named - There is No Ending
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On the flip side is the upbeat "I Gambled with Love and Won", sung by a different singer than "Ending". This one, as mentioned, is beat to hell, but the fun, bouncy organ playing drives the song for all of its 100 or so seconds, and the jolly singer (and surface noise) keeps me from focusing quite as much on the equally obvious lyric work.

Download: No Artist Named - I Gambled With Love and Won
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Sammy - Unplugged!

This is another one of those weeks when time is exceptionally short around our place, so I'm not going to go into any great detail about today's offering. Suffice it to say that it is not a song-poem release, but a demo on the Globe label, sent to the customer, most likely to encourage her to pay for the full band treatment.

Here we have Sammy Marshall unplugged, with just a piano and a tasty little 90 second song-poem-ette nugget, titled "Lost My Independence":

Download: Sammy Marshall - Lost My Independence
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Here is the flip side, by one of the co-writers of the a-side, but with none of the clever lyrics or jaunty sound of "Independence". This rather morose number is titled "Sometimes I Wonder":

Download: Sammy Marshall - Sometimes I Wonder
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He's Sorry He Answered the Phone

Today's record does not broadcast itself as a song-poem the way that a record on Preview, Halmark or many other labels would. In fact, it's an acetate, with not even the songwriter's names listed on either side. But there are some key factors here which I think demonstrate that a song-poem is exactly what we have here.

First, there is the artist. In the late 1940's, someone named Jack Allyn made a handful of records for the Novart record label, a song-poem outfit helmed by song-poet George F. Franciosa, Sr. Jack Allyn is an unusual enough name that it made this acetate, credited to the same singer, worth a listen. And if you compare this vocalist to the one singing on Novart's greatest hit, "Goodness Gracious, It's Contagious", you will probably come to the same conclusion that I did - this is the same singer. The same singer, I grant you, sounding much older, but this record is dated 1972, nearly 25 years after "Goodness Gracious".

And that's another thing that points this to being a song-poem: the setting of this record seems to have been a perfect arrangement for 1951, a typical flaw of the song-poem world. Within its own genre, hopelessly out of date even 41 years ago, the song is not a bad one, although the lyrics are far from original. Still, it's a nice listen, if you're up for this sort of thing.

Download: Jack Allyn - I'm Sorry I Answered the Phone
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On the flip side, we have the even more outdated "Every Day of My Life", with a lyric that sounds straight out of the 1930's to me. I do get a kick of out the completely out of place glissando that the pianist decided to include just before the 90 second mark, but otherwise, this one has very little to offer.

Download: Jack Allyn - Every Day of My Life
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A Sammy Marshall/Kris Arden Globe Acetate!

Another rarity today! Perhaps not as rare as a Stylecraft 78, or a Cubs song-poem, the combination of which was shared a few weeks ago, but a 78 acetate from Globe isn't all that common, either. That's what I have here.

The Globe company released few "records" as such on their own label, mostly limiting their own name to demos of their products on acetates, and putting their actual "releases" out on literally dozens of labels. I have several Globe demos, most of them on 45's, and most of those are simple piano and vocal demos.

But in this case, we have what sounds like a finished product, and a pair of songs that could easily have found release on any of those myriad labels that they were connected with.

First up is label mainstay Sammy Marshall, and the song "Winds of Chance", a song and arrangement which is a perfect fit for Sammy's talents. There are few elements to this record which give it away as anything but a failed attempt at a hit (mostly a few bum notes here and there in the backing, and some less than inspired lyrics).

Download: Sammy Marshall - Winds of Chance
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Over on the flip side is another of those clues to this not being a "real release", that being that the flip is by another artist entirely, in this case Kris Arden. This performance of "Take Your Letters", is, to my ears, a slightly clunkier arrangement and performance of a slightly stronger song than the one Sammy got to sing. I'm not a fan of Globe's reliance on hokey sax solos, however, I am partial to the brief guitar solo here, and a few of the simple, accented fills performed by the drummer, as well as the warm lead vocal.

Download: Kris Arden - Take Your Letters
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One of a Kind?

Today, something very special, a song-poem acetate demonstration disk. I picked up a handful of these recently, most of them featuring Cara Stewart and containing multiple other clues as to their song-poem origins. This one, however, is more of a mystery. Like most acetates, I'm sure it was produced in very small numbers. In fact, this may be a one-of-a-kind record. The songwriter has placed a sticker with his information over part of the name of the recording service, which I don't really want to remove, but which might be covering up the only clue as to the song-poem factory which produced the record. The two clear pieces of evidence that this is a song poem record come from the fact that the performer is Rod Barton, a singer whose work shows up on several of the smaller song-poem labels, and the fact that the record came with sheet music of the song. The song itself is titled "Heat (The Prospector's Song)", and here's that sheet music, followed by the track itself.

     
Download: Rod Barton - Heat (The Prospector's Song)

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The flip side is not labeled in any way, and someone clearly didn't want it to be mistaken for the "hit" side, as that person has drawn several large marks across the playing surface in some sort of crayon, oil marker or something similar. I believe this is also Rod Barton, singing a cappella, although the title is not clear.

Download: Probably Rod Barton - Unknown Title

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Must Be the Wooden Shoes....

Today, I am sharing the contents of a little acetate I found somewhere or other about 15 years ago, a violin performance of "Dutch Dance", recorded in 1952 by one Walter Feiss (well, that's actually a guess - I suppose there could have been two Walter Feisses trading off phrases, but I doubt it).

While I won't deny that this record is part of the "Difficult Listening Hour", I treasure anything like this record, whenever I'm lucky enough to come across one. I must have hundreds of home recorded records from the golden age of home record cutters (1940's and 1950's). Some of recordings of other records, many have recordings off of the radio, and many more (the ones I am really looking for) have some sort of home recording, either audio records or musical performances. For some reason, this one has always stood out as a favorite of mine. Let me know what you think.

Download: Walter Feiss - Dutch Dance

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