Stood Up AND Standing Tall

Today, we return to the waning days of one of my favorite labels, Tin Pan Alley. At this point, they were about at the end of their series of releases by "The Melodiers", and about to move towards their final credited artist, another band called "New Image". For "The Melodiers", at least, I tend to hear the records that feature a male singer as having been sung by the same vocalist who had been with the label for some time - Mike Thomas - only now backed with a thicker band sound. I'd be interested to hear if others think the same, or differently.

Anyway, I was quite taken with the mouthful of an ungrammatical title of "Stood Up and Standing Tall in My Saddle Tonight", and was very happy to find that I wasn't disappointed by the song, either. The band plays an energetic, peppy backing, while the singer voices the lyricists tale. That tale is a first person story of a man who was two-timed, then left alone, by his gal, and spends some of the song telling us how proud and happy he is in his saddle, while spending the rest of the song - an inordinate amount of time for someone is feeling "no pain at all" - about how she done him wrong. Meanwhile, the band bashes away behind him most enthusiastically. 

Download: The Melodiers - Stood Up and Standing Tall in My Saddle Tonight

Play:

~~

On the flip side, we have the same ensemble, in thuddish slow rock-a-ballad mode, and with their female lead singer, with "Just Because". The same person wrote both of this lyrics, and I hope he was much more pleased with "Stood Up". 

After one of those dreaded spoken introductions, we get to the song at about the 0:45 point, and it's the equally dreaded "you look happy, but I know you're not" sort of things, with "ain't this a meaningful song" broken chords on the guitar throughout. Blech. 

Download: The Melodiers - Just Because

Play:

 ~~

And now, something much more enjoyable than that last track. It's two more of my "cut-up" tracks from way back when. If you don't know what this is about, please read the bottom of this post, or any post from late January or February. 

I have two of these for you today, an appetizer and a main course. And for the first time in several weeks, there are no obscenities hidden within these two cut-ups. 

First up, a brief, but I think entertaining little take on Elvis' "Can't Help Fallin' In Love". This doesn't even get us to the second time he sings the chorus, but what's there is fun: 

Download: Elvis Presley - Can't Help Fallin' In Love (cut-up)

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And something a more substantial - a cut-up of one of the sweetest records to ever hit the top ten, Patience and Prudence's "Tonight, You Belong to Me". If you're not familiar with this record, I encourage you to seek it out, and be charmed just about out of your boots, and then seek out more of their material, much of which is off-the-charts wonderful. Anyway, I think this one is pretty funny. 

Download: Patience and Prudence - Tonight, You Belong to Me (cut-up)

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Vilma Records

 Howdy, 

Before we get to today's offering, I wanted to call attention to something written by frequent commenter Sammy Reed, in response to last week's Nita Craig 45. He has encouraged people to check out a six part story about the woman who was known as Bonnie on Preview 45's, and which also covers some of Nita's story. He explains it better in the comment at the bottom of this post. He has posts, as well, some of which are of song-poems, and they can be found here. Thanks, as always, Sammy!

~~

Let me say, right off the bat, that I don't think that today's offerings are particularly outstanding. However, they do represent two tracks from a label which is not on the AS/PMA website, has never been featured here, and has barely been documented anywhere online, with the exception of a listing on discogs (and, I suppose, maybe somewhere else that I may have missed). Plus, it features a song sung by the only person in the song-poem world that I have interviewed, Rod Barton: for me, and for that reason, hearing from him is always nice. 

We'll hear from Rod first, but before that, look how fun the Vilma Records label is!: 

Rod's song is "Drifting Along", and it, like the flip side, is a pretty staid, maybe even stodgy number, not terribly unlike what you'd hear on a George Liberace, Star-Crest or Noval record. Discogs suggests that this record is from 1957, and while I have no idea where they got that, it certainly seems possible, since the actual performance sounds like it's from about 1943. On the plus side, someone put in enough work on this to make it sound like it could have been an actual pop record meant for sales and hoped-for success, if not a terribly good one. 

I also get a kick out of the fact that this record fades in. 

Download: Rod Barton - Drifting Along

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By the way, the author of the lyrics to both of these songs is Paul Bostic, who may have been the mastermind behind Vilma Records (I wonder if he ever created a companion label called "Vred Records"). And Paul Bostic later had at least one of his songs worked up and recorded by Preview records, and sung by another Rod, the much better known Rodd Keith. 

~~~

On the flip side, we have Drake Morgan, who I've featured here once before, and who appeared on the Air and Caveman labels, which AS/PMA seems to think was associated with Globe. If this is from 1957, and is a Globe production, it's fairly early, indeed, for that song-poem factory, at least as to my understanding. 

This song, Lonesome, strikes me as sounding as if it's an even older recording than "Drifting Along". I'm put in the mind of the mid 1930's, perhaps part of that is Drake's singing style, but the sentimental lyrics, specific word choices ("Gee!") and the arrangement add to that impression, as well. 

Download: Drake Morgan - Lonesome

Play:

~~~

Switching gears about as violently as possible, perhaps akin to slamming the car into park while going 35 MPH, now I have this week's "Cut-Up". If you haven't seen my recent posts, feel free to review them to find out what I'm talking about here, and if you don't do so, prepare to be surprised. 

Anyway, a few posts ago, I featured a cut-up down with my best pal Stu, circa 1982, of "Jailhouse Rock". Whatever day that was, it was a very productive day in terms of wasting time being funny, because after completing our rearrangement of Elvis, we turned to "Da Doo Ron Ron" by the Crystals. 

Now "Da Doo Ron Ron" happens to be my favorite hit record of all time, and certainly one of my top ten tracks that anyone's ever released. As perfect a song, arrangement, production, vocal performance and overall recording as I ever expect to hear. So this was particularly fun for me. 

A couple of thoughts. 1.) Again, this is not safe for work, due to one f-bomb near the start. 2.) The name you might not be able to make out replacing "Ron" in the first verse is Chicago Cubs great Ron Santo, saying his own name. 3.) The name replacing "Ron" in the second verse is that of Ron Selle, a Chicago area native who sued the Bee Gees, eventually unsuccessfully, for stealing a song of his when they wrote "How Deep Is Your Love". 

I think everything else is understandable and, hopefully, humorous. 

Download: The Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron (cut-up)

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Maybe There Is No Fantasy

Today, as promised, I'm going back to back with Rodd Keith posts, since I hadn't shared any of his material in several months, prior to last week. This week's offering is a disc he shares with another singer, but we'll get to that in a moment. 

Rodd's side is titled "There Is No Maybe", and it's a record with a groovy mid-'60's midtempo thing, complete with verses that describe the hesitation on the part of the writer's sweetheart, leading into pre-chorus and chorus where the writer responds with the title phrase. The structure reminds me of some Neil Diamond records, although I suspect there hadn't been many of those, yet, to result in such an homage, when this record was made. 

Download: Rodd Keith - There Is No Maybe

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On the flip side, we have Nita Craig with "Fantasy". Presumably, Nita Craig is the same Nita who shows up on a handful of records by Rodd and Nita and by Bonnie and Nita. And while "Nita Craig" is only credited on two documented Preview sides, other singers named "Nita", with different last names, show up on about a dozen Preview singles. I'm guessing they're all by the same person. 

"Fantasy" is a 6/8 thing, loping along while Nita sings about imagining all the places she could go, and the backup singers doot-doot, ooh and aah, and answer her with the same thing she just said many times, in the manner than Preview would beat to death in the Gene Marshall era. And maybe it's just me, but this record seems to go on forever...

Download: Nita Craig - Fantasy

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And now to my cut-up of the week. And again, if you're not familiar with these, check out the link to "cut-ups", below, and read the earlier posts. 

Almost all of the cut-ups I've shared thus far have been from the period when I was making these seemingly all the time, between 1981 and 1985. In 1985, I graduated from college, got my first job in my chosen career, and met my future wife, all in the space of three months, and time for goofing around with cassette recorders and records plunged to close to zero. So I didn't make any more cut-ups for close to 20 years, at which point I had a short period of doing all sorts of mash-ups and cut-ups with my then-new computer editing software. 

One of the handful of songs I did in this manner was "The Green Door" by Jim Lowe. If you don't know this record, first, you really should, in my opinion. It's one of my all time favorite hits, and surely one of my dozen or so favorite songs to hit # 1 in the USA, which it did in late 1956. If you don't know it, you can hear it here. A perfect record, with an absolutely indelible melody and unique sound - and apparently recorded in the artist's apartment!

Anyway, I had a lot more things to "drop in" by the early 2000's, including some words and sound effects from a CD-ROM game my children were playing at the time. I also made some use of tracks which had been shared in the 365 days project, which I had been a part of, from 2003. 

While there's nothing as aggressively off color in this one as there has been in some of the other cut-ups, there is one tame four letter word, and a few other things that, while not obscene, are probably not safe for work. 

Download: Jim Lowe - The Green Door (cut-up)

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The Return of Rodd

 Howdy, folks, 

For the first time, I have no updates, having completed that project, except for two lengthy tribute posts, last time around. 

And by chance, I found this week that somehow, I have gone since last fall without sharing a Rodd Keith record. I've had a few which seemed likely to feature his production magic in those ensuing months, but there have been no Rodd vocals on this site in months and months. So I'm going to feature Rodd for at least the next couple of post, or perhaps every other post. 

Part of the problem is that I'm running out of Rodd singles which I own, and which haven't been shared here or elsewhere, but there are still some left. And today, I have one of them, I will also return to sharing one of my cut-ups, after skipping that feature, the last time around: 

Today's Rodd 45 finds our man Keith in a country mood, and, if my perception of his vocal is correct, subtly mocking the genre, as he did from time to time when singing country-ish numbers. The backing track will surely be familiar to some of you, as it was used repeatedly on Preview 45's. 

This song, "I Love Him So", strikes me as oddly incomplete, starting a story and not really finishing it. It's the story of a blind boy and his lost dog. I can't think of too many story songs (or those that seem to be telling stories) that never actually complete the story, or even move it beyond the basic set-up, but that's what happens here. In addition, this record seems to go on forever, lasting a very un-song-poemish three minutes and 27 seconds. 

I will also acknowledge here that both sides of this record are beat to hell. Sorry about the poor sound. 

Download: Rodd Keith - I Love Him So

Play:

~~

The flip side finds us in more of a country-flavored pop setting, a song with the remarkably unwieldly title "You Are the One and Only One For Me". The song and backing band sound are pretty dang bland, but I do have a soft spot for what Rodd did with the (double Rodd) duo singing backup. 

Download: Rodd Keith - You Are the One and Only One For Me

Play:  

~~

And now, yet another "cut-up". This one was done in tandem with my best pal Stu, way back around late 1982. In this case, we turned Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock" into "The Big Boy Rock", with lots of references to food (among other things), much of those taken from the Big Boy ad that you can hear in its original version near the end of this post, which I contributed to the 365 days project way back in 2003. 

By the way, a couple of the drop-ins are from private recordings that Stu and I had access to, including the first one, "restaurant", which came from one of my own songs. 

And again, I will mention that this is not safe for work, on account of a single four letter word early in the cut-up. 

Download: Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock (cut-up)

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The Wolf-Tex Label

 Greetings, dear readers, 

Well, today is the day. Today, I have reached back and corrected the first handful of posts that I wrote on this site, way back in June and July of 2005. So now, with the exception of two very labor intensive posts (which I will repair later), every record described in this site's history is paired with a download link and a playable link to that record. Yay!

To reach that conclusion, I had four posts from the summer of 2005 to refurbish. And as I said with the last batch of corrections, as it turns out, I later shared all of this material at WFMU, but I wanted the posts on this site to be able to stand alone. And so, we have the following: 

1.) The introductory post I wrote on June 24th, 2005, a few days after my 45th birthday, which is here. 

2.) My first musical post, featuring a favorite of mine by Thurl Ravenscroft. 

3.) A much beloved track by Harley Luse and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys, complete with an addendum containing further information. 

4.) My first mention (here) of Merigail Moreland, in a post featuring the song "Head Cheese". 

5.) A song I knew nothing about, from a Russian album I'd bought years earlier. This one also contains an addendum, including photos of the record labels, and a request for anyone to tell me the name of the song, and whatever else the label says. That post is here. 

~~

Today's spotlight is on the Wolf-Tex label, a label which I have never featured before largely because I only have a few releases on the label. And Wolf-Tex fascinates me, as there are things about the label which can only really be said for one other label, and that is Fable. 

For in addition to being the sort of label (such as Air and a few others) which did business collecting tracks from multiple song-poem labels and releasing them - a system I already don't really understand - Wolf-Tex also made at least a handful of attempts at releasing potential hit records (without success), records which have gone on to be highly collectable in the rockabilly collector's world. Those are by Harold Montgomery (father of John Michael Montgomery), and have sold for as much as $1000.00. 

The combination of a highly collectable subset of records released along side song-poem records is a bit like Fable, but the level of success of those few collectable discs is outside of anything else found in the song-poem world. 

Here is what one side of today's Wolf-Tex release looks like: 

This record has what appears to be three tracks from the Globe song-poem factory, and one from Film City. Oddly, as you'll see on the flip side (below), both of these companies are credited by name on the other side of the record, while the first song credits "M.G. Guitar" rather than Globe, in Nashville, and the second one here does not credit a company at all, which is odd, only in that the other three songs have credits. 

The first song up is my favorite of the four, by far. It certainly sounds like it's from Globe, but admittedly, I do not recognize the singer, credited here as Roy Biggs. And as the song is written by "C. Biggs", maybe this is more of a vanity project, commissioned with Globe, then a true song poem. 

Anyway, the song, "Play Boy" has a groovy beat, a swingin' vocal and some chirpy back-up singers, and it's a catchy tune, to boot. It even has a pretty good story song lyric, about a guy who achieves fame but loses love in the process. Good stuff!

Download: Roy Biggs - Play Boy

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Staying with Globe, we have an artists credited as Gene Brooks, but who is quite clearly Sammy Marshall, here joined, very nicely, but I singing group credited as "Coquettes", which sound to be, at least at times, like three Sammy Marshalls. The song, with the rather clunky title, "That Thing Would I Do", doesn't hold up its end of the bargain, as it's bland, with lyrics reflected in 300 other song-poems. But I do like the harmonies. 

Download: Gene Brooks (Sammy Marshall) - That Thing Would I Do

Play:

~~

Now, let's flip the record over and take a trip from Nashville to Film City in Los Angeles. 

The Chamberlin playing and vocal on "She Meant So Very Much to Me" cause me considerable confusion. The AS/PMA website reports this record to have been released in 1965, and those dates were usually based on considerable research, or at the very least, a dated ad from a music publication. 

Yet this track - credited to "Val Norman" - has a singer who sure sounds to me like Jimmie (or Jimmy) James (the music sounds like other James tracks, too - from the post Rodd Keith period). James is not known to have recorded for the company until the late 1960's at the earliest. On the other hand, "Val Norman" has one credited performance on the Film City label itself, on one of the first dozen or so releases from the label! So I'm confused. Anyone out there have any insight? 

Anyway, musically, this is no great shakes, but the lyrics have a twist which caught me off guard, and rendered them sweeter and more endearing than I think they would have, without that unexpected element. 

Download: Val Norman - She Meant So Very Much to Me

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The EP ends with by far its weakest cut, and for once, we have a singer credited under a name she regularly used on song-poems. It's Damita (who also recorded at times as Joan Auburn and as Kris Arden), and of course, for someone billed under a name she regularly used, in this case, the folks at Wolf-Tex put her name in quotes. 

The song, "I See the Lord", sounds more like a demo than a produced song-poem, featuring, as it does, simply a piano accompaniment and vocalist. The lyrics, while no doubt heartfelt, are fairly trite, and there's not enough in the arrangement to make the performance interesting. 

Download: Damita - I See the Lord

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ADDENDUM: Please see the comments for some nice, additional research regarding the credits on this record, done by my pal Stu. 

A Song Title For the Ages

Howdy, everyone, 

Well, last week I mentioned being short of time, and that I'd be brief in my comments. Little did I know how much time I would have starting the next afternoon. For one day later, I learned that, due to COVID's effect on my agency's finances, my position was being eliminated, effective immediately. After 29 years with my agency, I am out of a job, and this is the first time in about 40 years that I've neither been employed or in school. Hopefully, it will be just a hiccup in time, but who knows. 

Anyway, I have updated another three posts from way back in the summer of 2005. To explain two of the three posts, I should mention that, as I was flailing around for something to post, I decided to offer up my listening list for the month of June, and offered to share anything from that list on my site. My friend Michael asked for six of the tracks, and I posted them, in two posts. The first featured three tracks from a Latin flavored Percy Faith album from 1952, along with a detailed explanation of how I had known two of these tracks since I was a toddler, the story of my family's first reel to reel tape, which I've subsequently told elsewhere a few times. The other featured three moderately large hit songs from 1959 and 1960. All of these have subsequently become easy to find on YouTube, but hardly anyone knew what that was in 2005, so I'm fixing these posts to get this site back the way it once looked and worked. 

The other "fixed" post is one which was meant to be part of a series (which I never really got very far with), called "The Perfect Record", in this case featuring a wonderful Nordic-flavored record from around 1950, which I later also shared at WFMU. 

And now, for a title as unique as anything I've ever seen on a song-poem: 

~~~

I try not to feature the same label - and certainly not the same singer, within two or three posts of each other. But when something comes this far out of left field, I have to share it with y'all. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I thought Ellen Wayne did a fairly poor job on the two songs I featured in a post at that time, while also allowing that she has been quite entertaining on certain, more "out there" material. 

And that's what we have here. with the bewilderingly titled "A Bellingham Playday Song", which immediately has become one of my favorite song titles ever. The Catalog of Copyright Entries shows that Edna Rice copyrighted this lyric in 1962, along with a song called "Bellingham Children". Bellingham is a city in Washington State, and I'd put money on it that Ms. Rice lived there at some point, probably when she wrote these lyrics. 

Okay, so I'll give you 150 guesses as to what "A Bellingham Playday Song" is about. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Give up? Well, it's about how much the writer loves Jesus, how much Jesus loves her, how mean the devil is (there's actually more text about the devil's meanness than there is about Jesus). Then there's a bridge section about Jesus as a child. 

Ellen Wayne provides her typical over-the-top, so bad it's good style, stretching out words so much that there are words in that bridge that I can't make out - enough of them that I have NO idea what the point of that lyric is. And those are the ONLY words in the song besides the chorus that I already summarized.  

And this may be nit-picky, but I also get a kick out of how this is "A" Bellingham Playday Song, and not "THE" Bellingham Playday Song. Like, maybe there's a whole series of Bellingham Playday Songs, and this is one of them. I'd love to hear the others. 

If they were still making song-poem compilations, I have to believe this would have been one of the selections. It would absolute have to be. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - A Bellingham Playday Song

Play:  

If someone out there has an insight as to what the title might mean, and how it relates to the lyrics, I'd LOVE to hear it. 

~~~

The flipside is called "The Feeling", and it starts out great guns, with a driving piano/bass/drums arrangement, similar to several other TPA records from the period. To my ears, though, it doesn't sustain. The lyricist's work is all over the map. Within the first verse, the singer has professed her feeling that she and her lover will never part, AND that they are drifting apart. 

We quickly move into a piano solo, one which is marked by a few clams, and far less of the energy I felt in those opening bars. When Ellen returns with her vocal, she's now sure that she has lost his love. That was quick. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - The Feeling

Play:  

~~~

And now, one of my favorites of all of the Cut-Ups I've ever done. If you are just now hearing this term from me, please check the last several posts, as I've explained what these are and where they came from a few times. 

By the way, if any of the inserts I've used intrigue you, and you want to know where they came from, simply ask, and I will answer, if I remember, which will usually be the case. 

I don't have much use for Lionel Richie's body of work, except for a couple of records with the Commodores and one solo release. But I think that solo release - "Hello" - is quite a good song and record. So it was a natural for me to chop it into bits and make fun of it. 

I think this came out quite nicely, and, as I said with a couple of my other cut-ups, this is not safe for work. 

Download: Lionel Richie - Hello (cut-up)

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On a side note, you may have noticed the word "edit" on some of these cut up files. This is an indication that I've tightened up or slightly changed the original tapes, in order to improve them in some way. 

Fables from Sandy Stanton

Happy End of February!

I don't have a lot of time this week, so I'll be brief. 

I only had time to overhaul two of my previous posts, but that does leave with less than a dozen posts to fix, going forward. In this case, they were both from September of 2005. One featured two obscure singles from a favorite 1950's duo of mine, Patience and Prudence, and the other was an acetate featuring some very homely sounding violin playing. 

And now: 

Every now and then, I like to try and feature the Fable Label, which is sort of iffy with regard to a series called "Song Poem of the Week", because Fable releases went from song-poem to vanity release to attempts at legit hits almost throughout the run of the label. 

For today, though, I'm fairly sure these are song poems. Both are country flavored pieces warbled by label owner Sandy Stanton (with the "Fable Chorus" according to the label).

First up is "Time Has No End", which, despite having come out in 1958, sounds to me more like and early 1950's country release. One with some fairly cookie cutter country lyrics, but a rather lovely backing track. 

Download: Sandy Stanton and Fable Chorus: Time Has No End

Play:

The flip side has the unwieldy title "Don't Play With My Heart Like a Toy", and it features a country-ish vocal over a fairly standard late 1950's rock-a-ballad setting. The presence of the moment where Sandy's voice breaks - well, more the fact that they didn't do another take - is another indication to me that this is a song-poem record. 

Download: Sandy Stanton and Fable Chorus: Don't Play With My Heart Like a Toy

Play:

~~

And now, as has been my habit since I was requested to do so, I am featuring another of my early 1980's "Cut-Ups". I think this one is one of the most inspired that I did, and it has a theme running through it, as you'll hear. 

And it all came from the fact that the song in question, "Blue Eyes" by Elton John, could be reworked nicely if I replaced the title phrase with the many different ways that George Carlin said "Blue Food" in one of his recorded routines. 

I hope you enjoy it. 

Download: Elton John - Blue Eyes

Play:

Everything's Blue Hill! Plus, The Merigail Moreland Story Continues

Hello, everybody, Hello!

What a cornucopia I have for you today! I have two singles - unrelated in style, background or any other aspect, except that both feature the same odd aspect of having the same word repeated over and over again, and both contain the same vocal sound, not often heard on records. 

Before that, I will announce here that I have gone even further back in the archives and corrected three more posts from the initial year of this blog, 2005. That October, I featured a fairly horrible record by Pinky Pinkston (whom I was later to feature in much more detail at WFMU, as mentioned and linked in that post). I also offered, for the very time on this blog, two song poems, and, on what would have been John Lennon's 65th birthday, I shared four favorite excerpts from the often bootlegged "Get Back" sessions. While obviously those have become even more widely available in the more than 16 years since (and been the focus of a marvelous recent documentary), I still want to make this blog look like it originally did, so I have shared those tracks again. 

And now, let's climb the Blue Hill

The Blue Hill label seems to have been the creation of a handful of people whose names show up on the eight known songs produced on the label. Seven of those eight tracks came out of the Globe song-poem factory, but here we have one which came from Lee Hudson's production house, with Hudson's go-to male vocalist, Jeff Reynolds. 

This record apparently dates from 1962, and perhaps the lyricists expected a twist beat. I mean, it is called "Blue Hill Twist". But as you may know from experience with his productions, Lee Hudson didn't do twists. He did do slinky, bluesy numbers, though, and that's what we have here. 

First, I will say that this record sounds great. But second, I will add that I've listened to it at least five times now, and I don't know what the hell he's singing about. And I really don't understand the buzzing bee sound he throws in. And yet, all in all, a very enjoyable record. 

If someone out there "gets it", please chime in. 

Download: Jeff Reynolds - Blue Hill Twist

Play: 

The flip side is from the folks at Globe, as indicated above. And for the third time on the record - including the label name and both songs, we have a reference to Blue Hill. This one is called "Full Moon Over High Blue Hill", and is sung by the inevitable Sammy Marshall. This one has some nice Hawaiian style guitar, but very little else to recommend it. 

Download: Sammy Marshall - Full Moon Over High Blue Hill

Play: 

~~~

And now, something I am VERY excited to share. I have discovered yet another record by Merigail Moreland. If that name means nothing to you, click on her name at the bottom of this post, to find other posts I've made here about her, but also visit my lengthy posts about her at WFMU, here and here. 

Anyway, I never would have found this record, had I not also been searching for records by her father, Don Moreland, as Merigail, in yet another reworking of her name, is here credited as Merri Gayle (another pair of releases had it as Merri Gail). 

The record was released on the Beeline Records label, and (as was true of the record above) BOTH tracks contain the name of the label in their titles. Here's the better of the two sides: 

I am increasingly in love with the track titled "Be My Beeline Baby", and it once again plays up how fantastic a singer Merigail was, even in her teen years - which, based on the little I know of her life, is when I'm guessing this comes from. 

This was, in fact, the b-side of the single, but it is by far the stronger of the tracks, at least to me. But then again, the calypso shadings of the arrangement and fantastic horn track are right up my alley. All that pales, however, before Merigail's vocal, which I find to be off the charts sexy, particularly in the bridges, and even more so on the lines where she sings "I want kisses by the dozens", etc. 

An absolutely stunning vocal and a great record. 

Download: Merri Gayle with Larry Wellington's Orch - Be My Beeline Baby

Play:

The flip side, "I'm Makin' a Beeline For You!", sung with Don Moreland, was the a-side, but it doesn't do nearly as much for me. The standard late 1950's big band sound is not a favorite style of mine, the song doesn't do it for me, either. Oh, and maybe it's just me, but knowing the singers were father and daughter make the whole exercise sort of weird. 

But, as with Jeff Reynolds, on the previous 45, we have some bee buzzing sounds here, tying these records together in another weird way. 

Download: Merri Gayle and Don Moreland with Larry Wellington's Orch - I'm Makin' a Beeline For You!

Play:

~~~

Okay, for the last few posts, by request, I have been sharing some of the best of my "Cut-Up's", reworkings of hit songs and other material that I like, in which replacement words are plugged into key moments of the songs. For more information, please look at my recent posts. Today I'm sharing one of my all time favorites. 

But before I share this one, I have a question. Are people enjoying these, and wanting to hear more? This feels sort of self-indulgent to me, but won't feel quite so much that way if people are actually digging them. 

Okay, so here's today's "Cut-Up". When Elvis returned from the army, he cut the masterful "Such a Night". It resides in my all time top 25 tracks that anyone has ever recorded, and remains my second favorite Elvis track, behind only "A Fool Such as I", but was shelved as a single in favor of the milquetoast "Stuck On You". Perhaps it seemed out of touch with the softer sounds of 1964. After the Beatles hit, it was belatedly released as a single and made the top 20. 

So it was a natural for me to do a cut-up of this record. And the repeated lines, and story nature of the lyric, made it a natural for cut-ups, too. I think this came out great, particularly what I interspersed in with the grunting and chanting at the end. 

There is a low level four letter word repeated here, and also another word which is not obscene, but is also not typically used in polite conversations, so this is probably not safe for work. 

Download: Elvis Presley - Such a Night (cut-up)

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Tin Pan Alley Twin-Spin!

Hello, everybody, hello, 

Okay, so I continue to march through the earliest days of this blog, repairing old posts in backwards order. Today, I have added the sound files to three posts from October and December of 2005, the first year of this project. 

These include: 

1.) A posting of my own live rendition of "The Night Before Christmas", as it was rendered after I put it through the wringer of eight language translations with a now-long-defunct (and fairly poor) free translation site. I later posted this same recording to WFMU.

2.) A set of two examples of the way I was playing with sound that year, one of them the first "cut-up" I'd done in years (of "She Loves You"), and one a layering of elements of 16 pop hits, most of them from the late 1970's, over the original recording of "Yesterday". 

3.) A post about my mom, as she entered the hospital at the beginning of her decline (she died two years later), featuring two of my favorites of her performances. 

All in all, a very Bob-centric set of posts. Sorry about that. Must have been where my head was at, at that moment. 

Oh, and I did get a request for the Merigail tracks that I mentioned last time. Since I'm already sharing two singles this week (and two more "cut-ups"), I'll try to get to that one next time. 

And now: 

~~~

So I realized with a bit of surprise that I hadn't featured Tin Pan Alley in over three months, and thought I'd rectify that with a double offering, one record from the early 1960's, and one from circa the Summer of Love. We'll start with the latter, and better, of the two. 

I truly expected Cathy Mills' "I Was a Dry Wishing Well" to have a lyric which used the Wishing Well as a metaphor, but I was wrong. Instead, it's a fairly delightful and bouncy rendition featuring a lyric in which the wishing well tells us about the people who wish at her location and what they wish for, and entreats those who doubt her power to give it a try. 

And delightful is absolutely the word - if I didn't know better, I'd  have thought Rodd Keith had a hand in this backing track - it has some of the hallmark's of his work at Preview around the same time (roughly 1967), particularly the opening guitar figure, but even more so just the general feel of the thing. This is a really cute and fun record. 

Download: Cathy Mills - I Was a Dry Wishing Well

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The flip side has the clunky title - one which sounds as if it were coined by a non-native speaker of Enlgish - of "My Romance For This Summer-Time". It turns out to be a supper-club-ish number, meandering and unfocused, with a melody I find genuinely hard to follow. 

Download: Cathy Mills - My Romance For This Summer-Time

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The other record, featuring an earlier and more interesting Tin Pan Alley label design, is from roughly 1962, and featuring two songs in styles I would peg to the very late 1950's:

I have greatly enjoyed some performances by Ellen Wayne, mostly on novelty or lighthearted TPA releases. Judging from this record, and some others, I would say that her style on more serious is not my cup of tea. 

Here we have a song with one of the quintessential song-poem titles, "You Hurt Me". The lyrics are pretty standard cookie-cutter song-poem level. Ellen's vocal is, to my ears, over the top, with an almost ridiculous level of vibrato at times, and a degree of emoting via stretching out words and syllables which draws attention to her and away from the words. Your mileage may vary. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - You Hurt Me

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The flip side, "Hold Out Your Arms to Me", bears some resemblence to what the Platters and others were doing in 1956-57, with the exception of that weird stopped beat at the start, which doesn't work for me at all. Ellen tones it down a bit, but only a bit. The song is pretty disposable. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - Hold Out Your Arms to Me

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~~~

And now, to my offering up of more of my "cut-ups". Please see the bottom of the my previous two posts, and indeed, the link above to another posting of a "cut-up" for what this is about. 

I'll start with an aperitif, perhaps the briefest "cut-up" I ever did, all two-and-a-half seconds of it. It's another Beatles tune, chopped down to a very basic interaction. 

Download: The Beatles - We Can Work It Out (cut-up)

Play:

For the other one, I just played around with the sounds on one tune, rearranging things within that record. You may need to familiarize yourself with the song.

You see, when I was six, we got the album "The Return of Roger Miller", and I fell in love with it, and it's still one of my dozen favorite albums. I could go on about that album for an hour. Anyway, while this song, "Our Hearts Will Play the Music" is not among my favorites from the album, it is ripe for playing around with the lyrics. 

If you haven't heard the song, I suggest you listen to it first. You can hear it here.  

And now, here's the cut up. You might note a change in tonal quality early on, as I think I switched from a cassette copy of the song over to the original reel, in the midst of playing with the song. 

Download: Roger Miller - Our Hearts Will Play the Music (cut-up)

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Norman's Lullaby

As we bid goodbye to January, 2022, it's time for one more post this month. 

But first, in my ongoing quest to return this blog to its natural state, I have updated two more posts, and in doing so, completed nearly everything going back to the start 2006, meaning everything but the 2005 posts, and two complicated later posts have now been repaired. 

This required the fixing of two posts. First up, and rather redundantly at this point, was my first posting of a pair of tracks by Merigail Moreland, which later were a centerpiece of a longer post I did at WFMU. But for the same of completion, I thought I'd update that post. Plus, they are two of my favorite recordings ever. 

The other post I "fixed" is, happily, a post featuring at least one, and possibly two, song-poems. It was the second time I had done that on this blog, well before I turned most of it over to song-poems. In that post, I featured a ridiculous Phil Celia track, and an oddball number (possibly more of a vanity record than a song-poem) by Barney Spencer. I also featured a track by The Eligibles on Fable, a track which I'm sure was either a vanity release or an attempt at hit making, and not a song-poem. 

Speaking of Merigail Moreland, I did, a few years ago, manage to find one more single that she released, in the early 1960's .If anyone reading this blog has an interest in hearing that single, I'll be glad to share it. It seems to be even more impossibly rare than the one I shared in the post linked, above. 

And now: 

Today's feature is perhaps a minor pleasure, but I deeply enjoy Norm Burns, and I haven't featured him in over six months. 

Here's Norm, or as he was billed here (and as he was for only a brief time, early in his tenure at Sterling), Norman Burns, with "A Mother's Lullaby". The Sterling Band provides their sterling sound, and Norman croons a sweet lyric about a mother singing her baby to sleep. There is a nostalgic, old timey feel to the whole production which I find appealing. 

Download: Norman Burns - A Mother's Lullaby

Play:

~~

For the flip side, here's what I'm guessing: someone looked at the title, 'Just Give Me a Home in the Mountains", and was reminded of the song "Home on the Range", and decided that the tune of this song would bear more than a slight resemblance to that great American folk song. Seriously, see if you can listen to this track and not be put in the mind of "Home on the Range". 

Norm gives it the old college try, but there's not much here to work with. 

Download: Norman Burns - Just Give Me a Home in the Mountains

Play:

~~

And now, another "Cut-Up". In case you didn't see my last post, here's part of what I wrote: 

Recently, I linked back to a very old post in which I'd shared two of my "cut-ups", tracks made in which I played around with the sounds and lyrics of favorite songs, replacing lyrics with words or lyrics from other recordings, or simply messing around with the sounds of a track. 95% of more of those "cut-ups" that I have, I made as a young adult, while in college and/or single, and with a LOT of time on my hands, doing all of the edits on a cassette recorder which had a very effective pause button. 

I have been requested to share more of these, and will do so, at least until I gauge whether there is continued interest, or, perhaps, people ask me to stop. 

I will continue with the Beatles theme I started with last time. However, this one is totally different, and more in keeping with my typical practice, which was to replace lyrics of one song with sung or spoken words from another recording, sometimes a song, sometimes someone speaking. 

Before sharing this "cut-up", I will offer a few warnings. 

1.) This is extremely not safe for work - there are multiple four letter words contained herein. 

2.) A few of the jokes created by my cutting things up are fairly crude in nature, and if you find such things unpleasant, you may want to skip listening to it. 

Last week, I featured a song from the Beatles first album. Now, I jump to near the end of their career, for a dismantling of "Yer Blues", from The White Album. 

Download: The Beatles - Yer Blues (cut-up)

Play:

A Little Golden Record About Hippies

 Greetings!

I hope it's warmer where you are than where I am. But not over 75 degrees. I don't like that, either...

I will get to today's feature in a moment, and will also, by request, start sharing more of my "Cut-Up" tapes, but first: 

I discovered a couple of days ago that I skipped over "fixing" two posts from 2007, and so I have corrected those, as well as one post from 2006. There are now barely 20 more posts that need to be overhauled. And from here on out, almost all the posts I'll be repairing actually never had files in them before. That's because, for the first 18 months or so, I was uploading tracks to an e-mail account and giving out the password so that anyone could get in and download them. In fixing all of those early posts, I will be doing the same as I've been doing all along in repairing of posts, and putting in a play feature and a download feature.  

For today, I have correctly those two posts from October of 2007, one featuring a Rudy Vallee 78 that I just love, and the other featuring a musical mystery which I wrote about much more extensively at WFMU about a year later. I have yet to get an answer to any of the mysteries contain in the post here or at WFMU, so if you have an answer, by all means, let me know!

Going back even earlier, I also updated my final post from June of 2006, which featured a novelty record about beer, which was fairly obscure at the time, but has had multiple postings to YouTube in the years since, often incorrectly credited to Thurl Ravenscroft. 

~~

Today's feature is a very late period Film City release, on some truly gorgeous translucent gold vinyl.

The performer - Jimmy Allen - is not credited elsewhere on the label, or anywhere else in the song-poem database, and both songs are credited to a team of three writers. Both of these facts might serve to indicate that this a vanity release, but I don't think so. A "Jimmie Allen" shows up on a Rodd Keith production on the Kondas label, and one of the writers - Frank Parkins - seems likely to be the same person as a Francis Parkins who had a song produced for him on the Vellez label. So I think it's a song-poem while accepting that it might be more of a vanity release, something Film City did with some regularity, simply providing Chamberlin backing for the composer/performer's song and performance. 

Anyway, whatever its history, these songs are worth hearing, particular "Hip, Hip, Hippy". This is the rare song-poem which talks about the Hippies, and has nothing but good to say about them, and in fact dismisses the thoughts of those who look down on them. Now, I've listened to this track four times today, and the only positive attribute being described is that hippies aren't tied down, and like to go where the road takes them. That doesn't strike me as good or bad thing in and of itself. However, there's no missing the feelings behind: 

"The hip, hip hippy's not so dip, dip, dippy as the whole world thinks he is"

The clumsy edit at the 1:02 mark is a wonder of incompetence, by the way. 

If you have a thought about this records provenance, leave a comment!

Download: Jimmy Allen with "New Sounds From Hollywood" - Hip, Hip, Hippy

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The flip side, "Trina Bird", is no slouch, either. Sounding extremely similar to the track behind, "Hip, Hip, Hippy", this song is a tribute to an apparently quite winsome teenage girl of the protagonist's acquaintance. And apparently Trina likes the singer just as much. 

Download: Jimmy Allen with "New Sounds From Hollywood" - Trina Bird

Play:  

Oh, and I meant to point out - and before I could even come back in here and type it up, Sammy Reed beat me to it (see the comments!) - both of these tracks have the odd feature, which I've commented on with a few other records, of featuring a fade out, but ending with a final chord before the fade out finishes. Very strange. 

~~~

And now....

Recently, I linked back to a very old post in which I'd shared two of my "cut-ups", tracks made in which I played around with the sounds and lyrics of favorite songs, replacing lyrics with words or lyrics from other recordings, or simply messing around with the sounds of a track. 95% of more of those "cut-ups" that I have, I made as a young adult, while in college and/or single, and with a LOT of time on my hands, doing all of the edits on a cassette recorder which had a very effective pause button. 

My "cut-up" work slowed to a crawl in 1985, when I met my then-future wife, and started working full time, and had stopped altogether by 1988, when we got married. Ah, to have that sort of free time again. I've made perhaps two dozen such playful tracks in the years since, mostly using computer software.

Anyway, I heard from someone named Douglas who wanted to hear more. Actually, if I understood correctly, it sounded like one of those shares from the earlier post was going to get played on the radio! Thank you very much!

In response, I will share some more. Today, one of the few that does not actually feature the sounds of a lot of different tracks, but mostly (except for the last two seconds), just a rearranging of the sounds of one track, in this case, "Twist and Shout" by the Beatles. 

I consider this a hell of a lot of fun, especially starting at the 0:30 second point.

Download: The Beatles - Twist and Shout (cut-up)

Play:

Soldier Boy....Oh My Little Soldier Boy

 Howdy, 

This week's offering is a few clicks down the page. But first...

Before getting to post update news or this week's offering, I want to catch up on some things that readers have shared, in response to previous posts. I know not everyone looks at comments, and more often than not, I don't answer the comments in the comments, as I never know if the original poster will be looking for a response. But several people have said or shared things recently that I thought worth bringing to everyone's attention, and I'm going to get to some of them now, and more in the future. 

First, thanks to everyone who writes in and comments. If you use your actual e-mail address, and there's a response I want to make, I will write to you. However, I understand why most folks do not choose to post using their actual e-mail addresses. 

More than 11 years ago, I posted a great Suzie and Rodd duet, titled "I'm the Wife". Well, a correspondent named Michael recently pointed out that the composer of the flip side, "Country Boy", got his name in the local Kingston, N.Y. paper, in 1967, by stating that Preview Records had recorded his song, no doubt presenting this as a great accomplishment, rather than something he'd paid them to do. The newspaper article can be found in the lower right quadrant of this page. Michael further found an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, from 1965, on a similar theme, this time regarding a song-poet named Helen Zorkowski, who had several songs recorded by preview over the years. That article is here. 

Thanks, Michael, and thanks for the nice words about my work here!

Then there was a comment from frequent contributor, and host of his own wonderful blog, Sammy Reed. On the post where I featured a song-poet who claimed to have written "The Lord's Prayer", he linked to a post he'd made in which another song-poet claimed to have created the words to the gospel song "Oh, Happy Day", and that post can be found here. Thanks for all your help and comments over the years, Sammy!

In response to my obituary-with-soundfiles for Pete Seeger (which is one of the few post 2008 posts which I haven't fixed yet), Martin has shared with me that he posted a rare audio of a Pete Seeger concert from East Berlin in 1967. It can be found here - you can download it from near the end of the German part of the post. Thanks very much Martin. I look forward to enjoying this. 

And finally, just this week I heard from the daughter of the singer who went by the name Rod Barton. He is the only person from the song poem world that I've actually spoken to, and he and I had three phone conversations many years ago - unfortunately, he has died at some point in the years since those conversations. Her comment can be found on this post. 

~~~

In addition to all that, I have, as usual, corrected even more of the early posts to this site. I've worked my way back to 2006, the year with the fewest posts in the history of this blog (just nine). At that time, I was sharing things that tickled my fancy, whenever I got around to it. 

Specifically, today, I've repaired five posts made in July of 2006. Four of them were made on the same day, July 1st. These offerings were all over the map, and included a terrifically awful vanity 45 from a folky type singer, an equally wonderful (and also possibly vanity) 45 from a 13 year old girl, a failed hit 45 that I just love by Joan Armatrading, and a B-side to a late '50's hit record which I've always loved, and which features Thurl Ravenscroft. I ended that month with a post featuring two songs from Jimmie Driftwood, one of my favorite performers ever - the second track there remains one of my all time top 50 tracks. Some of this material later got posted to WFMU's blog, but I thought I'd "fix" the postings on this site, anyway. 

~~

And finally, today's offering. 

Today, it's back to the early days of the Preview label, a period which I know to be a particular favorite for many song-poem fans. 

And this is a nice one, sung by Suzie Smith, with "The Raindrops" credited as the backing singers, and a track which sounds very much to my ears as something Rodd Keith probably put together. It's called "Good-Bye My Soldier Good-Bye My Love" (to phrase it exactly as it is on the label). Vietnam is never mentioned here, but this could probably be considered a Vietnam related song-poem, based on the lyrics. 

Suzie sings over a martial beat for the verses, which then swings into double time - and some nice harmony vocals - for the choruses. The lyrics are pretty much boilerplate "my soldier love has left for the war" stuff, but the arrangement and vocal make them fairly effective. 

Download: Suzie and the Raindrops - Good-Bye My Soldier Good-Bye My Love

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Suzie Smith appears on the flip side without The Raindrops, on a song called "The Key to My Heart". This lyric is tied to the backing track that Rodd Keith used perhaps more than any other in his Preview days, most notoriously when Preview actually used the exact same track on both sides of the same 45. 

I don't think Suzie or anyone else behind this particular side do anything special with the material, and this is one of those tracks that seems to me to go on for about five minutes (really barely more than three). Maybe you'll like it more...

Download: Suzie Smith - The Key to My Heart

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