Merry Christmas, Everyone!! Stay tuned all the way to the bottom for this year's offering in my family's series of Performance Art flavored Christmas Cards.
I want to make sure I make sure that I offer up a last minute link to a site that long time reader and commentor JW put up last week, filled with Christmastime song-poems! It looks like he set up this blog specifically to share these Christmas treasures, so go and have a look. The first post, at the bottom, has nine song-poems available for download, while the second, more recent post, has a couple more songs you can download, AND a link to his "song poem yule log", with a veritable cornucopia of Christmas song-poems.
You can find all of the above here!
I have also, as per usual, updated another month's worth of old, broken posts, in this case, August of 2011. These include a typically badly pressed MSR offering from Bobbi Blake, a typically inept performance by Gary Roberts, a fantastic early Tin Pan Alley number from Ellen Wayne, and a downright weird tribute to Elvis by The Real Pros. There is one more repaired page, as well, as I'll explain below.
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The Meloclass label both fascinates and sort of confounds me. It seems to have been more of a vanity label than a true song-poem label, in that the songs sound like semi-professional work in a lot of cases, or at least as if they were written by people who had some idea of how music works, and with a definite sense of humor. And most of the releases boast credits showing a team of songwriters, often some combination of "J. DeFranco", "G. Vanderburg" and the fantastically named "Tumbleweed Thompson".
That all spells out a vanity label, and yet... they returned to the song-poem market again and again for their singers. They utilized the Globe factory on a Sammy Marshall release on a small label, and Vandenburg was the co-writer of multiple songs on a Rodd Keith album generated by Film City. And after I posted another song sung by "Richard House" (who is credited on today's feature), at WFMU - labeling it as a vanity release - Sammy Reed was good enough to point out what I'd overlooked: that "Richard House" is an early nom-de-song-poem of the man later and better known as Dick Kent.
On the other hand, my favorite release on the label seems to have been a straight vanity release on one side and what sounds like a song-poem on the other, although the two sides, which are extremely disparate, were credited to the same group. And I went out of my way to "fix" the posting of that song, more than three months ahead of schedule, as it is from 2010. It can be found here, and is absolutely worth hearing, again and again. .
That brings us to today's feature. It is, as mentioned, sung by Dick Kent, under the guise of "Richard House", at least on the first side I'm offering up, and he is joined by what seems to have been Meloclass' house vocal group, "The Five Fellows".
"Who No Pay José" is, from today's perspective, full of fairly obnoxious stereotypes and hackneyed soft racism towards Mexicans - although oddly, near the end, "Richard House" seems to sound more like the Italian stereotypes of the day than the Mexican ones.
If you can overlook all that - and I'm sure there are those who can and will - this is an enjoyable-sounding record, with a bouncy track, a moment in the middle with some momentary, odd key modulations, and an honest-to-goodness jazzy solo by a muted trumpet, something I don't recall hearing on a song-poem record.
And as was the case with the single that I shared in 2010, this record was released at least twice, with two different songs on the flip side.
Download: Richard House and the Five Fellows - Who No Pay José
Play:
On the flip side, is another song which is more clever and well put together, by at least half, than all but the best song poems. That's not to say that I enjoy this one. "Cinder Fella" is performed in the sort of pre-rock style, akin to the Four Aces or The Four Freshmen, that I simply cannot abide, at all. Ack. Your mileage may vary, of course.
It's too bad, because the lyrics are clever, and I'd like to hear what someone else would have done with them.
Download: The Five Fellows - Cinder Fella
Play:
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Finally, as promised, my family's Christmas card. For most of the past decade - with a few exceptions - we have tried to create something interesting and different each year, and most of my late-December posts in recent years have featured a sharing of the latest card - you can click around in those old posts if you're interested.
Anyway, here is this year's card. The concept was mine, but my older child Sage had the wherewithal to make it work via computer wizardry and such. For those who might ask (if any), the fifth person, a young man seen in our previous few pictures, is my younger child's boyfriend, and they are still together, but he couldn't be present for this photo.
