When the Rooster Crows...

A belated Happy Mother's Day to all Mother's who are reading this post, and all those who have or had a Mother. 

Today I have an Air label EP, on which just one of the four songs is really and truly worthwhile, and for those of you who want to skip the dross, I encourage you to skip to the last song, after which this post is named, for something fairly entertaining. 

Very briefly, the Air label, for whatever reason, seems to have existed to put out singles and EP's containing the works of multiple song-poem factories, often two or three different producers on the same 45. I'd be lying if I said I understood how this worked or why such an arrangement existed. At least occasionally, songs appearing on an Air release also came out on the home label of the production company, too. 

In the case of today's record, all four songs come from the Globe song-poem factory, with three of them being by that singer most often credited as Sammy Marshall, here cunningly hidden behind another false name, Sonny Marshall. 

The one non-Sammy/Sonny tune leads us off, and it's by one of the lesser-used Globe thrushes, Mary Kaye. "Why Can't You Tell Me" has lyrics which feature that artless quality that I've found myself writing about lately. I was particularly taken with the point at which the word "reason" is rhymed with "treason" although the latter word is meaningless, in the context of that line. It also seems to me that Mary Kaye was not the right person to record in a trio with herself - some of the chords that result are fairly painful. 

Download: Mary Kaye - Why Can't You Tell Me

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On to Sonny-land. His first offering here, "Hopeless Love" portrays a painful situation for its protagonist, and Sammy/Sonny has just the right catch in his voice for this material, which he proved again and again and again. It's too bad, because this could have been something moderately okay, what with that voice of his. But the lyrics are pretty cookie-cutter, and have been revisited a million times, and the band offers a level of uninspired support which matches the quality of those unoriginal words. 

Download: Sonny Marshall - Hopeless Love

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Flipping the record over, we have the song "Rose Marie My Love", written by Buddy Gay, who I'm sure had no idea that if he just changed one letter in his name and picked up the blues guitar, he could have been world famous. This is nearly as faceless a track, lyric and vocal performance as I can imagine. I really can't work up anything else to say about it. 

Download: Sonny Marshall - Rose Marie My Love

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Now for some fun! That title - "Where the Rooster Crows" - suggests something entertaining might be coming, and the quote from "The Chicken Reel" at the start of the track confirms it. What a set of fun, ridiculous lyrics! We're told that it's fun to be on a farm in Arkansas, and the examples of the fun are.... a broken toe, falling in a pond, and being blown 10 miles away in an explosion. Oh, and "all you can hear is Bim Bim Bim", whatever the hell that means. Okay, okay, so this record is aggressively stupid. I know. But I'd rather that something like this exist than to not have it exist, and it makes me laugh.  

Download: Sonny Marshall - Where the Rooster Crows

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Cuckoo for Coco Records

Greetings!

Before I get to this week's offering, I have a bit of housekeeping. 

First, I received the following interesting query from a new visitor to this blog: 

Hello Does anyone know where I could get a copy of the Cinema Records & Action Music Compilation of various persons . Who entered the 73 or 74 "American Song writers Compition"

It's a 45 rpm with several songs on each side. My copy was destroyed.

It includes; "Those happy days that we once knew" written by myself:

Merv 

I know nothing of this record, but if anyone out there does, please write me, and I'll try to put you and this long-ago song-poet together. 

And second, with regard to my fanciful mocking of last week's posting, specifically my amusement at the line "our song was worthless", Sammy Reed has pointed out that the line is probably "our song was wordless". Undoubtedly so, I suppose, but it still sounds more like "worthless" to me. 

And now.....

I believe I have a brand new, previously unknown song-poem label for us to gawk at and enjoy. The product on the record is from the Globe song-poem factory, which rarely used its own name for releases, and there is really very little indication of quite where (or when) this record came from, other than that someone named Chloe was definitely involved. 

The winner of the pair, for my money, is this genuinely oddball Sammy Marshall track, "Goodbye Mister Blues". Why oddball? Well, if you're going to use the word "Blues" in the title, you are very likely to use one of the standard settings for blues. And while this fits the bill in terms of instrumental backing and general groove, it's also a fact that blues typically comes in 8 bar, 12 bar and 16 bar forms, as well as a few others. And, in fact, the solo section and the bridge are both standard 8 bar blues patterns.

But oh, my, those verses! They are 7 1/2 bars long - bar six of each verse is two beats long. What the hell? Pretty damn disorienting for a simple song-poem, or for a standard blues arrangement, let alone both. What were the people at Globe... oh, sorry, Coco, smoking? Cocoa-Puff fatties? 

Download: Sammy Marshall with Orchestra - Goodbye Mister Blues

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On the flip side, we have occasional Globe performer Mary Kaye, with the somewhat more sedate "Sad Heart". This has a nice, loping beat, a pleasant melody and an engaging vocal, but nothing else about it really connects with me. Oh, and I do greatly enjoy the last two seconds. But otherwise, a fairly standard Globe offering.

Download: Mary Kaye with Orchestra - Sad Heart

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Popular Teen Styles on LECTRON

Let me be the first to wish all of my readers of Happy New Year!

I continue to rehab my site. Today, I have finished correcting posts from 2007, fixing five posts from July and August of that year. Again, this was a point at which I was simply sharing items from my collection that I particularly appreciated and seemed to be rare. Youtube has subsequently changed that last aspect, but still, I'd like the site to be playable from the earliest posts on. 

During that summer, I posted a goofy, yet endearing number by Don, Dick and Jimmy, I shared a song in Swedish that I wished to know more about (and subsequently did learn more about), I let everyone hear an odd easy listening version of a Beatles hit, and shared two of my "cut-ups", which were cassette-edited popular songs made into jokes. 

And although it's redundant at this point, I have also fixed a post, from that summer, in which I shared, for the first time, my all time favorite disc that has any connection to the song-poem world, although I'm now convinced that the record in question is not a song-poem. I later shared the record again, along with its b-side, when I got my own copy, but here is the first time that I featured "What's She Got (That I Ain't Got)". 

I have also put in addendums to a couple of those posts. 

~~

And now, Let's Go Lectron!

Today, I have a pair of genuinely sweet and effective tracks from the teeny-tiny Lectron label, whose label describes the product contained therein as "Popular Teen Style". And never has a slogan or motto been more accurate, as these two songs are composed in the most popular of teen styles for 1963, when this record was produced. 

Both sides are credited to Mary Kaye, who did some work for the Globe song-poem factory, but the A-side is actually a performance by Mary Kaye AND Sammy Marshall. And the lyrics to "Secret Thoughts" are among the best I've ever heard in a song-poem: they do an exceptional job of describing the silent longing between a teen boy and girl, who each have romantic feelings for the other, but feel unsure of expressing them. 

The words capture this dynamic perfectly - the verisimilitude is on a level I would generally associate with professional songwriting - and the arrangement captures the sort of thing that "Paul and Paula" briefly had massive success with, right around the time of this record's creation. A genuinely sweet and affecting song and performance. 

The only flaw here is that the record appears to have been pressed in asphalt. The sound quality is abysmal. 

Download: Mary Kaye (and Sammy Marshall) - Secret Thoughts

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The flip side, "Actions Speak Louder Than Words", does indeed feature a solo turn by Mary Kaye. And again, it's in "Popular Teen Style", in this case, something of a twist beat, and it moves and grooves throughout - all 100 seconds of it. 

Again, the words here are pretty good, and they've been set in a sort of percussive manner that bounces off the drumbeat in places, an effect which I find sort of intoxicating. Mary Kaye's warm vocal really sells it, even if there are a couple of bum notes (perhaps she was sight-reading, which was so often the case in the song-poem world). 

There are some nice backing vocals which in a style that reminds me more of the later Preview label than what Globe usually came up with. I have a hard time saying which of these two tracks I like better - both are several levels better than the average song-poem. 

Download: Mary Kaye - Actions Speak Louder Than Words

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~~

And finally, those of you who have been reading my posts for the last few years know that my family uses the Christmas Card tradition to engage in a bit of performance art each year. Previous end-of-the-year posts have other examples, and now, here is the latest in the series: 

From the left, that's me, my wife with the marshmallow in her face, then our two adult kids, and on the right, the fellow who will soon be, variously, husband, son-in-law and brother-in-law to the rest of the individuals in the photo. 

Words and Music by "Jim" Stross

I know posting around here has been a little sparse in recent months, and particularly in January, but BOY OH BOY do I have a lot to share today, including eight previously unheard song-poems, all from the same disc.

First up, I am happy to announce that I have been invited to be part of yet another podcast, this one focusing on my own personal 25 favorite song-poem and song-poem related records. This has been in the works for over six months, and the podcaster, Brian Kramp, and I finally did the interview late in January. The podcast can be heard here and here, and if you want to see the list of songs, it can be found here (the list is in reverse order, from 25 up, with a section near the top of a handful of song-poem related discs (which are not actually song poems). It's all explained in the show.

Brian was nice enough to include one of the songs from my recently released album of comic songs, and also to include a cover I performed, live, of one of my favorite song-poem related records, at the end of the show.

Looking over the list, there are some others I might have included - and I've been invited to do a second episode. I think there might be a few replacements in the bottom half of the list, so this is not my absolute top 25, but it's close, and the top 10-12 are unshakable. And as I've mentioned here before, my tastes in song-poems does not necessarily match that of the larger (however large it is) song-poem fandom world - there are, for example, no MSR, Sammy Marshall or Gene Marshall tracks in this top 25, it does reflect that my basic taste in music prefers things from before 1965 in a lot of cases, and a LOT of the fringe of this fringe world is represented.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

Brian has also offered up a multitude of song-poem ads that he's found, since our interview, and I'm going to share those with you, much as I shared a similar collection that was sent to me a few years ago. I don't have a lot of details about them. Here's one from Calgary:

~~~

Second, as has been the case for the last several months now, I have fixed yet another month worth of postings, in this case, January of 2014. This was a month I tried out a short lived feature in which I shared song-poems about places, a sort of song-poem travelogue. This includes the earliest known "Real Pros" record, featuring a trip to Napoli, a peppy Rodd Keith trip to Wisconsin, an absolutely wonderful pair of polkas from Cara Stewart, and a soulful vocal from Gene Marshall. I remember deciding to go on that little song-poem road trip, and can hardly believe it was over six years ago!

This completes my postings from 2014, with the exception of a massive post I did upon the occasion of the death of Pete Seeger, which I will have to put back together when I have considerably more time. 

~~~

To make up for the slow down in postings lately, I thought this would be a good time to share a song poem album. In this case, "album" is a bit of an overstatement, as this is a ten-inch special, containing eight songs and about 24 minutes of music. But it's a unique entry, in that it represents an otherwise unknown label and song-poet. 

The songwriter - who in this case wrote both the words and music, making this a song-poem/vanity hybrid, is identified as "Jim" Stross, just like that, with quotation marks. He employed the Globe song-poem factory and its stable of singers, providing that key link between vanity project and song-poem release. The label is JKS, presumably Mr. Stross' initials, and the label informs us that the record is "Not For Sale". Don't tell anyone that I bought it on eBay. 

The first side contains the following four songs: Just Before Sunset, One Night in Tucson, Sudden Love & Stop Playing With My Heart. The first three are sung by Sammy Marshall, the final one by Kris Arden. They generally have the typical Globe studios sound. I have not separated them out - here is side one: 

Download: Various Artists - Words & Music by "Jim Stross", Side One

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Side two starts with my favorite of the eight songs, a Sammy Marshall dance special - which are almost always fun - titled "Dip, Flip, Twist, Stomp". This is followed by My One Ambition (which has a co-writer and is sung by Kris Arden), Autumn Rain (sung by Mary Kaye), and Santa Claus Means Christmas (sung by Kris Arden). Enjoy!

Download: Various Artists - Words & Music by "Jim Stross", Side Two

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Sammy Ponders

Before offering up this week's seasonal offering, I wanted to provide a link, for those who may have missed it, to the post I did of TEN Christmas song-poems, at WFMU last Sunday. It can be found here.

For today's feature, we have the ubiquitous Sammy Marshall, showing up this time on the Globe offshoot Roxie label, but sounding as canned as smarmy as a Globe imprint Sammy record can, as he ponders the question "Is It Christmas Everywhere?"

Download: Sammy Marshall - Is It Christmas Everywhere
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As I've found is often the case with Christmas song-poems, the better half of this single is found on the flip side - the non-Christmas side - of the release. In this particular case, "better" is a relative term, but I'd certainly rather have a second listen to Sammy and his label-mate Mary Kaye warble "While I'm Still Missing You" than I would to Sammy's Christmas offering.

Download: Sammy Marshall and Mary Kaye - While I'm Still Missing You
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The Doodle Bug Rag

One of the largest song-poem factories was called "Globe". Records on the "Globe" label are almost all (if not all) acetates, rather than actual releases, but the company provided material for over 100 song poem labels labels that had been identified by the American Song-Poem Music Archives (before it was mothballed). Many of these labels were vanity names, releasing songs only by one or two writers. Other released hundreds of records. Sometimes the only apparent connection with Globe is the presence of one or more of Globe's standard vocalists. Here's one from the Show label - the only record I've ever seen on this label, although the AS/PMA website shows a different one for the same label. Globe stalwart Mary Kaye sings a peppy number, "The Doodle Bug Rag": 

Download: Mary Kaye - The Doodle Bug Rag

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The best reason to share this record, though, is because when I bought it, it still had, attached to the 45 sleeve, the marketing materials that Globe sent out to... whoever it was that received this record. The record description actually contained brief statements regarding this record on one side, and comments on another single on the other side (you can make out the print on the reverse side, in this scan):

Then there's the comment card, both sides of which I've scanned. Note that the reply card comes from Globe, while the description of the record is credited to a different distributor: Finally, here's the "soothing South Pacific sound" of the flip side, "My Hawaii", featuring the man who truly was "the voice" of the Globe song-poem factory, Sammy Marshall:

Download: Sammy Marshall - My Hawaii

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