You Get No Love from Gene OR the Squires

This is a sort of fascinating record. While not every Preview release has been documented yet, and that will probably never happen, there is only one Preview release precisely like this one documented at the AS/PMA Preview page, and now here's a second one. 

What this record contains is a standard song-poem vocal rendition of a song, by Gene Marshall in this case (and in the other case, too), and on the flip side, the Preview house band, identified as "The Squires", play an instrumental version of the same song. And it's not just the instrumental track from the Gene Marshall version, it's another, different performance of the song. 

And this is a pretty misbegotten song. It seems that maybe the song-poet's first verse lyrics to "I Don't Love You No More" simply could not be fit into standard three-to-the-bar waltz beat. Or maybe someone was just getting overly creative in a way that really didn't work. Whatever the reason, in the middle of the first verse, there are two four-beat bars, and then near the end of that verse, there is a seven-beat bar (or I suppose it could be one four-beat bar). Even the nearly always perfect Gene seams tripped up by the second one. Oddly, the second time through the verse, the oddly places measures aren't present. 

And that's without even getting to the lyrics, which suggest that the singer has fallen out of love with his former flame because he doesn't like her behavior. Is that a thing? Can one simply turn off love? I don't think I ever experienced that, in any of my relationships. Maybe I'm the odd one. I dunno. 

Download: Gene Marshall - I Don't Love You No More

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The flip side, as mentioned, is an instrumental rendition of the same song. And this suggests that I was right with my second guess - that someone was getting creative with the structure of the song. I say that because the two four-bar measure in the first version are heard here, and there is no lyrical line to make space for here - in other words, the whole thing could have been a waltz in this version, if they'd wanted it to be. The actual performance is pretty much a sleep walk. 

Download: The Squires - I Don't Love You No More

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What the HELL is He Singing About?

When I first decided to share this record, "The Rocking Chair Brand", it was mostly because of Billy Grey's forced, borderline obnoxious fake southern/western cowboy accent. Near the end of that first play, though, my ears perked up. "When did the lyrics move in THAT direction?", I thought. 

I've listened several more times, and I'm just befuddled. I guess he's singing about being a cowboy who's just about ready to die. All the lines about payday and helping his pals confused me, but I think he's promising to send them fortunate outcomes from the great beyond. I guess. He wants to apologize to St. Peter for taking so long to get there - see, he is working on improving his soul. Then he tells us where he'd like to be buried, and if that line isn't from out of left field, nothing is. Oh, but forget that, because now he'd liked to be cremated. If they find a place to park, that is. Oh, and then he throws in the title for the first and only time during the fadeout, for no apparent reason. 

A true masterpiece of oddness.  

Download: Billy Grey - The Rocking Chair Brand

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The flip side is "Shadow Dance". Maybe I'm completely off base here, but as this record dates from the early 1970's, the backing track sounds to me like the band wanted to tap into some of what Marvin Gaye was doing, musically, on the "What's Going On" album (throughout, but especially in those first ten seconds), but clearly were nowhere near  up to the task. 

The dance in question appears to involve nothing more than shaking your hands in front of a fire. The lyrics are truly minimal here: aside from riffing on individual lines from the verse, there are, by my count, only four lines to the entire song. And this gives the band (guitar, bass, drums) a chance to indulge in a solo section of approximately 1/3rd of the length of the record - over 50 seconds, during which the bass player and the guitarist do not seem to be remotely in agreement about what the chord changes are. 

Download: Billy Grey - Shadow Dance

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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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Cardinal Rodd

Before I get to today's songs, a bit of a backstory. Nearly four years ago, in this post, I shared an EP of Sammy, er, Sonny Marshall singing four songs by Michael Rose. Within that post, I commented that I'd already shared one of those songs, "A Little Bird", in a post nearly three years before that. I also mentioned that, although Michael Rose was listed as the composer of "A Little Bird" on the Air release, on the earlier Cardinal post, the song was credited to a different person Margaret A. Rosenberger (although I didn't provide either of their names at the time). 

Now, I have another Cardinal release and it continues the weirdness and confusion. It also features four songs credited to Ms. Rosenberger, two of which were ALSO on that earlier Sonny Marshall EP from 2020, where they were also credited to Mr. Rose. 

Rodd Keith, in his guise as Rod Rogers and with Film City's Chamberlin, performs the songs on the first side. "If I Could Have One Wish Tonight" is 110 seconds of midtempo nothingness, made into something by the creative arrangement that Rodd worked out on his one-man-band machine. From the oboe introduction to the choral oohs to the "hey-let's-make-this-into-a-long-enough-record" instrumental section in the middle - which is simply masterful for about 33 seconds - this is true demonstration of what Rodd could do with that weird machine .

Download: Rod Rogers - If I Could Have One Wish Tonight

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The second song on this side is the stronger of the two, I think. "Oh, How I Miss You", starts with a well worn idea about looking at the moon and knowing she can see it, too, but it's phrased very effectively, and the words continue to be nicely put together for much of the rest of the song, too. The tune for this one is considerably more memorable, and again, Rodd's use of voicings is again very effective. 

Download: Rod Rogers - Oh, How I Miss You

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As mentioned, the two Sonny Marshall songs on this EP were already heard, in identical versions, with different writer credits, in this post, and I am not going to repost them here. They are available in that post. I will say that "My Second Home" is the strongest track on this EP, just as Sonny's "A Little Bird" was the best song on that previous Cardinal record I shared. That's twice that Sammy/Sonny and his Globe band outshone Rodd Keith, and that's a rarity indeed. 

Norm and Joe

In the early days of the Sterling label, when they were creating a sound I truly love, one of the first singers hired was someone named Joe Hall. I've featured him here once before, and he was really not a very impressive singer. I have a few other Joe Hall records, but they're just not very good. Shortly after his name starts appearing on Sterling labels, the name of Norm Burns shows up, and very quickly, Norm became the standard bearer, which he would remain until his death in 1974. And shortly after Norm showed up, Joe made his last record for the label, which is no surprise. Today's record may be the only one on the label which features Norm on one side and Joe on the other. 

As I would have predicted, the Norm side is the much better of the two. It's called "Ain't A-Kiddin' You", and it's just 110 seconds long. And what a cute little record it is, with a bouncy beat, a swinging band and a memorable melody. Norm provides a first rate vocal, too. 

I love Norm. 

Download: Norman Burns, Lew Tobin's Orchestra - Ain't A-Kiddin' You

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Joe Hall, of course, takes the lead on the flip side, "Honey, Honey Do". If a midtempo record can be described as "turgid", this might be that record. The band seems to be a room away from the microphones and are playing in a truly uninspired manner - hard to believe this is the same band. Joe Hall hits all the notes, but shows no style and doesn't do anything interesting. This record is only 17 seconds longer than it's flip, but seems twice as long. 

Download: Joe Hall, Lew Tobin's Orchestra - Honey, Honey Do

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How Charming!

 

Well, I've been super busy, and it's been almost two weeks since I posted. I really don't have much time even now, so I won't say too much about this week's Tin Pan Alley item, featuring Ellen Wayne singing about "The Charm of a Texan's Smile". It's got an appealing, loping beat, and the singer gives quite a winning performance. I find the few things the lyrics actually say about Texans to be somewhere between suspect and flatly untrue, in my experience, anyway - looking at you, Senator Ted Cruz (among many others) - but maybe these things were more true 64 years ago or so, when this was recorded. 

(Oh, one line rings true: I'm sure Texans still learn all about The Alamo, but somehow, I have my doubts that schoolchildren in Texas learn that the battle was about whether Texas would be allowed to have slavery, an that "we" weren't on the right side of that argument.)

Note the references to Hawaii and Alaska - since this record came out around 1960 or so, those are extremely topical, given that both states were new to the union the previous year. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - The Charm of a Texan's Smile

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The flip side is what Billboard would have probably called a "Rock-a-Ballad" at the time (or at least, a few years earlier). It's called "The Church on the Mountain", and everything is put together reasonably well, to very little effect. 

Download: Ellen Wayne - The Church On the Mountain

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Halmark: The Label Christian Song-Poets Prefer 10-1

This week, Christians are celebrating Holy Week, and so I thought what better time to feature a religion dominated record from that most religious of song-poem labels, Halmark. I don't know what it was about Halmark that attracted so many more religious oriented song-poets than utilized the other labels, but there's no doubt of the difference. Pick up any two or three Halmark releases and you are likely to find at least one, and maybe two or three songs with a Holy theme. 

(My apologies to Jewish readers, in that I have corrected the above paragraph, in which I indicated that Passover was also this week. I was sure I had heard that information, and even looked it up double check, but only looked that the dates, not the month, which is April and not March. Sorry about that.)

I have very little to say about today's offerings - really only a comment on one of them - so I will just line them up and let you enjoy them. Keep in mind that Halmark rarely labeled the performers on on their releases, preferring to provide the names and addresses of the song-poets. As it happens, these four songs all feature Jack Kimmel, in one case duetting with his wife Mary Kimmel: 

Side one features "I Am Thankful" and "Christ Jesus Touch": 

Download: Halmark Productions - I Am Thankful

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Download: Halmark Productions - Christ Jesus Touch

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Side two starts with the one song I'd like to offer a comment on. It's called "Things Just Don't Happen". So first "Things Just Don't Happen"? That phrase means that whatever things you are expecting won't be happening - it's an expression of dismissal of a possibility or, from the other side of the coin, disappointment about what didn't occur. I assume the song-poet's thoughts, based on the rest of the lyrics, was "Things Don't Just Happen", which is a completely different thought - things happen for a reason, they are... planned, caused.  

And this is yet another lyric of the type I mention last week, artless lyrics whose writer gave no thought to whether they could be fit into musical phrases. My favorite is probably "it's not a guess on the issues of life", but there are a few others. In fact, eventually, the singer has to narrate words that simply don't work musically, at all. 

Download: Halmark Productions - Things Just Don't Happen

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The EP ends with the only non-religious number of the set, "Dancing, Loving, Dreaming". Unless I'm reading too much into the lyrics, it sounds like this is the song of a man returning from time in the armed forces, and looking forward to his reunion with the one he loves. 

Download: Halmark Productions - Dancing, Loving, Dreaming

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Forlorn Norm

 

It's been eight months since I featured Norm Burns, and that's just too long. Here we have a pair of songs which are both about love, but which otherwise have very little in common, subject-wise. One is a forlorn expression of sadness at the wedding of a former flame and the other is a celebration of new love. I do think they share something else in common, though - that frequent feature of song-poem lyricism: The artless effort - the use of phrases which are not poetic and/or which are simply not phrased in such a way that they can be rendered effectively in musical fashion. 

For example, in the supper club-y "Lily! Oh White Lily!" we hear the decidedly unmusical phrase "during the wedding ceremony". I also want to pay special tribute to the drummer on this track, who could just as well be a loop of a set of two snare drum taps. The guitarist, on the other hand, seems to be really trying, and a few of those guitar fills are kinda nice. This song goes on forever, doesn't it?  

Download: Norm Burns - Lily! Oh White Lily!

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If you really want to have some fun with artless lyrics, though, I offer up the flip side, "Locked Hearts". These are not so much unmusical as they are simplistic and repetitive, not to mention that they rhyme "Hearts" with, um, "Hearts"

So your love and my love, they are the key to our hearts

So let's find the find the key so that we can open our locked hearts

That rhyme is null and void. 

There only appear to be four lines to the entire lyric, (well, eight if you want to divide each of the phrases into two separate lines.)

Download: Norm Burns - Locked Hearts

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A March Treat - a Full Star-Crest Album - And it ROCKS! (Well, Once)

 I have a treat for you today!

It's a full song-poem album. And it's on the mustiest of fusty old early 1960's labels, Star-Crest. I don't have a lot to say about it. The singer is Tony Rogers, who I have featured on this site twice - nearly ten years ago, and more than a year after that, and a label which I have featured in the past both here, and ages ago at WFMU. 

Here are the front and back covers, which, aside from song titles, were largely interchangeable from album to album. Note that, on this one, Tony Rogers doesn't even get a mention - just a tiny rendition of his name on the labels themselves. 

Star-Crest tracks tend to sound like not only were the musicians not aware of the Rock and Roll Revolution, but that they'd missed The Big Band Era, too. I'll really only make three more comments. 

The first is that, as they did on several other releases, the folks at Star-Crest included a song that everyone would know, perhaps to fool the listener (presumably a friend of one of the song-poets featured) that this is a legitimate release. Otherwise, why would there be a rendition of "Oh! Susanna"? 

Second, I have not separated the tracks. To do so would have pushed this post back another week at least. So there are just two files to download, one for side one, and one for side two. 

And third, the winner here is definitely, "Rockin' All Over the World" which is on side one, starting at 10:55. The good folks at the session make there very best attempt as a drummer, guitarist, tenor sax and violin can do, after a day of playing music that was otherwise about 40 years out of date, if not more. I'm actually impressed at how (relatively, and only relatively) close they came to being convincing, given how comically bad the folks at Noval did with a similar set of lyrics, although that label's Rock and Roll product, Rock, Rocking All the Time, is both more unintentionally hilarious and somehow, much more endearing. 

Download: Tony Rogers - Music of America, Star-Crest LP6200, Side One

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Download: Tony Rogers - Music of America, Star-Crest LP6200, Side Two

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Minimalist Lyrics, With Frank Perry

Okay, a few things before we get to today's feature. 

First, I heard from a correspondent named Jay, who has found the most phenomenal picture. Please research (here and elsewhere) W.L. Horning if you are unfamiliar with this man's work. With that said, I share with you now a picture of W.:L. Horning that Jay managed to discover. 

The picture had a caption which read: 

Wesley Horning, Denver Composer He learned to compose by picking out tunes on guitar.

If you have heard any of his "compositions" you will doubtless find that statement extremely hard to believe. Anyway, here he is: 

The other thing I want to share is that Sammy Reed has posted an entire song-poem album, one of the countless editions of "Music of America" collections which appeared on Hollywood Artists. There are some doozies on that album, which is posted here.

And now:  

~~

I get a kick out of today's 95 second feature, because it features what must be among the shortest bits of song-poetry ever committed to a song-poem record. When I saw that Frank Perry would be singing "You're Messing With the Wrong Guy", I assumed that Frank's performance would be a first person warning to someone that he himself (Frank or the song-poet) had had quite enough of... something and was offering a warning to stop messing with him. 

But nope, that's not it. In fact, the lyrics couldn't be less specific. Or less wordy. I hope you'll forgive me for ruining the surprise, but over some super peppy Chamberlin backing, the following four lines are all there is to the lyric here. Anything else is repetition or slight variance: 

Baby, you're messing with the wrong guy

Don't you know that guy will get you down. 

You're fooling with the wrong type of people

Don't you know they're trying to make a fool of you. 

And that's it. I also enjoy the hard stop at the end. 

Download: Frank Perry and the "Swinging Strings" - You're Messing With the Wrong Guy

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The flip side, "Going to Memphis" threatens (on the label) to be almost four minutes long, but it's actually just under three minutes. And this song honestly doesn't have many more words than "Messing", despite having an extra 75 seconds to say it. Perhaps you won't be surprised to see that the same song-poet wrote both of these masterworks. I find this side a whole lot less interesting than its flip side. It plods along, doesn't it? 

Download: Frank Perry and the "Swinging Strings" - Going to Memphis

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Gary Roberts: Bluesman Extraordinaire!

 

Those of you unfamiliar with Gary Roberts would do yourselves a favor and peruse this set of posts (which will start with this very post, until I post another Gary Roberts record). You will not be disappointed. You also can't go wrong listening to this classic. 

Those of you who are familiar with the song-poem work of Gary Roberts might have several words to use to describe his performances. I'm guessing that well down below word 100 on that list would be "Bluesman". 

And yet, that's what the bosses at Sterling assigned Gary to become, for the song "Remembering". The results are just as one-fifth assed as you might expect. Only the pianist here sort of seems to understand the genre, and the proceedings made even more delightfully incompetent by a blues harp solo which is shows off just about the equal to Gary's blues chops. (Now, admittedly, the appeal of the blues harp is 100% lost on me, but even as someone who avoids the instrument in that style of usage, I can recognize when it's being used by someone who has no idea how to use it.)

I note with some amusement that this is the very highest record label number found so far on which Gary Roberts' name appears, and that his tenure there lasted barely 100 label numbers (and he was not on all of those releases). I can just imagine - although I have no belief that this actually happened - that after hearing this performance, the folks at Sterling cut their losses and moved on to someone else. 

Download: Gary Roberts - Remembering

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In comparison, the flip side, "You Did Me Wrong", sung by Shelley Stuart, is a solid piece of entertainment. But only in comparison. The lyrics are artless, in the style that song-poets have achieved since the genre came into being ("Why are you doing this the way you are?"), and they read more as a series of prose sentence than as poetry or lyrics. A sense a bit an attempt at proto-disco by the band at the 1:33 point, although the beat is a bit slow for that. Other than that, musically, this is sort of a throwback to Sterling's earlier days, when Shelley Stuart showed up more often, along with Norm Burns, particularly in the use of all that echo. 

This is also the second highest numbered Shelley Stuart release on Sterling which has been found, to this date...

Download: Shelley Stuart - You Did Me Wrong

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Another Piece of the Norris Puzzle

To start today's post, let me just reiterate that, any time I come to own a previously unknown / unshared record linked to the fabulous Norridge Mayhams (AKA Norris the Troubadour), it will get shared here, and very promptly. 

I will do this even though many of these records have a dubious - or even virtually no - connection to song-poems. The link remains that, at a certain point in the 1960's, Norris stopped performing his own songs (or, as in this case, hiring and no doubt paying existing outfits to record them), and started using the song-poem companies to record his songs. But even at that point, as he had always done, it seems likely that he wrote both the words and the music for his material, so even when he used the song-poem companies, his releases were a little different than the standard material found on those releases. 

However, I find his story - and his music - endless fascinating, and so will always share with you what I find. And here's something believed to be unique among the tens of thousands of people who utilized the song-poem companies at one point or another. Norridge Mayhams wrote an actual, honest-to-goodness popular hit record. The song was "We'll Build a Bungalow", and you can hear the hit version here. Note the absence of Mayhams' name on the label. He spent years trying to sue his way into both receiving writer's credit for and receiving the profits of his song. 

Anyway, Norris recorded (and paid for others to record) "Let's Build a Bungalow" on his own labels more than a half dozen times, from the 1940's through his final records in the 1980's. But I'm going to guess that my new acquisition, heard below, is the first recording of the song, and it appears on Norris' own Co-Ed label, on a 78, which I'm guessing is from the late 1940's (although the lousy sound quality suggests to me the recycled shellac which was used near the end of World War II). It's credited to Carl Bostic and His Orchestra, a conglomeration which appeared on other Co-Ed 78's, as well, including one that I've shared before on this site, in a most excellent performance of an excellent song. 

For all of the reasons that I described above, this is probably better described as a Vanity Record than a Song-Poem, but again, in the interest of bringing more Norris/Norridge Mayhams to the world, I'm sharing it here. I'd like to draw particular attention to the almost random nature of the piano solo, particularly from 1:45 to 2:10. Some measures feature only a single note, others have flurries of notes which seem played almost by accident. 

Download: Carl Bostic and His Orchestra - We'll Build a Bungalow (You Spell It For Two)

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On the flip side, Carl Bostic and His Orchestra return, with a song called - and I want to get this right, exactly as it appears on the label - "I WANT A Co-ED by my SIDE". In case you just thought "Co-Ed was a clever label name, with a clever and unique logo, well, no. Norris was obsessed with all things college, and wrote songs about various aspects of college for much of his life. For me, the highlight of this song is the rather unusual use of language in spots, which is a trademark of Norris' compositions, although the pianist, yet again, makes some unusual choices in both the solo and in his fills. 

 Download: Carl Bostic and His Orchestra - I WANT A Co-ED by my SIDE

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