Sheila, the boys and I once spent a Sunday at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. One of the performers was a perky little woman named Christine Lavin. While she's aged some since we saw her live, she's still funny and odd even with white hair. One of my favorite of her songs is a tribute to men without hair and as a man who is losing his hair with startling rapidity, I find myself quite fond of this song. She also did a version some years ago with five other women who called themselves "Six Bitchin' Babes", a nom de plume somewhat at odds with their collective feminism.
Great song, though. Christine can be forgiven for her politics if she keeps writing funny songs.
I found this fun thing on Youtube. I like Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up". I drove our supervisor nuts when I worked at Brandom's Cabinet Mfg. back home in Keene. I think I've already told this story, but it bears repeating. I only worked at Brandom's a few months during a brief time of desperation and unemployment. Our lady foreman for the framing department wouldn't allow us to listen to the radio while we were working so the guy next to me and I taped the words to Elvis songs on our work boards and merrily framed cabinets while singing Heartbreak Hotel and All Shook Up. She tried to force us to stop, but management wouldn't allow he to stifle our creativity. They noticed we worked faster when we were singing.
This is the slower original version which I think was way better than the one he sang during his later years where he rushed it and always seemed to be in a hurry to get through it. I liked it better when he sang it like he wasn't tired of the song. Maybe he figured he was running out of time. Turns out he was.
Roger Miller wrote a whole bunch of songs I really enjoy. This quirky songwriter did some really happy stuff including stuff for the soundtrack of Disney's animated "Robin Hood". His hits were a perky lot including, King of the Road, England Swings, Chug-a-Lug, Walkin'' in the Sunshine, Dang Me, Do Whack a Do, and Ooh Da Lally,
Well you get the idea.
Roger's wry take on country music was unique back in the 60s when everybody seemed desperate to take themselves sooooooo seriously.
So, enjoy this gentle, light and funny musical voice singing in the midst of riots, upheavals, assassinations, and pointless wars the ruling power didn't really want to win.
My wife says I'm just a big kid. Listening to my Mp3 list is probably evidence of that. It tends to lean heavily toward Disney songs and old folk music suitable for kids. I'm a big romantic. I've got a dozen or so Doris Day songs, some things from Aladdin, Tangled, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Camelot and clips from Danny Kaye movies. This one I have no excuse for. I'm a six year old!
I just love these guys. I'll most likely post a whole bunch of these before it's over. Then there's this song from the wedding scene - "I Swear!" It just brings tears to my eyes (I'm laughing so hard).
So, have you ever wondered how Cowboys ever got into yodeling? It's not the sort of musical style that one would expect to find out in the Wild Wild West. So far as we know, yodeling is only common in the Swiss Alps - a rather long way from the plains of Texas.
Let us offer an alternative explanation. Here are Riders in the Sky with the story of how the Cowboy Yodel was born - a song guaranteed to make even the toughest CowBOYS cringe.
Steve Martin may have come up with the answer to what's wrong with modern atheists. Atheists seem to be a troubled lot. Avowedly atheist nations are responsible for probably half a billion deaths by war, extermination, genocide, starvation and execution. It could be that the trouble is that atheists don't have any atheist music. The best they can do is some angry rock n' roll, grunge rock or rap.
I love this song. According to Steve Martin it's the entirety of the atheist hymnal. The song is called, appropriately enough, "Atheists Don't Have No Songs"
You've got to admit it's a catchy tune. Any song that can use the word "Underpants" to rhyme with "Gregorian Chants", you have to admire that in a lyricist...
Ever once in a while you stumble across a weird little song and it just sticks in your head. This little ditty by Louden Wainright III celebrates an experience we've all had driving down a country road late at night. this is one of those songs you sing at the top of you lungs when you're driving along alone and feeling just a bit unhappy with the state of affairs in the world and you just want to express your frustration with the things.
Here's Louden Wainright III with "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road".
I am here to tell you that being a pirate is a dangerous business. I know. When I was 10, I was a swashbuckling buccaneer - fearless, dangerous with a sword and ruthless. My brother and I tied our flag to the top of the swingset and strung an old sheet from the crossbar so that it would belly out when the winds came. Texas has a lot of wind, so of course we were often taking in sail, shortening sail and setting sail. As a pirate in a North Central Texas backyard, we didn't have a lot of plundering opportunities, though we somehow found ourselves in a lot of sword fights. I'm here to tell you that wooden swords hurt when your kid brother lands a lucky shot to your knuckles and if he refuses to fall down dead when you shoot him with your trusty pirate pistol, well, there's not a lot else you can do but climb up the mast and set sail again.
It was a grand life it was (except for all the X-rays, the Mercurochrome, which stung like the blazes and which the ship's doctor (my Mom) insisted upon. The bandages were kind of cool, though.They contributed to your piratical look I must say.
This little song is popular in Irish pubs and Renaissance fairs and often badly sung by people with eye patches and fake peg legs who'd never get away with singing in public if the song wasn't funny. But it is a funny song and so I put it on my mP3 player to remind me of my sea-faring youth.....
Here's one of the better sounding versions of this song on Youtube with a cobbled together video featuring shots from Pirates of the Caribbean.
See what I mean about piracy? Not a great career choice my young friends. Take it from one who knows! Aaaaaaargh!
This is such an odd little song. First time I heard it, I hearkened back to my youth when I used to climb the trees every morning and wake the neighbors doing my Tarzan yell! I was a weird little kid back then. This is also the opening theme to Robin Williams' singular film, "Club Paradise" which I really liked, the critics notwithstanding.
I've always been fascinated by Tarzan. He's a hero figure and kind of a lonely guy living there among the apes. It's hard not to become one of the apes if you ever grow up to have any power over others, especially when the apes used to push you around when you were little. The great temptation is, as another song I posted earlier put it, to be "sittin' around in some junglescape, dumb as an ape doin' nothing." I admit it. The whole jungle thing appeals to me.
So here are The Kinks with a live version of their classic, "Ape Man".
The Zimmers recreate the Beatles iconic Abby Road photo.
This week I got deep into a federal grant and didn't post any new songs. This is my secular song for the week. It's by a lovely group of senior citizens. The thing was first done about ten years ago. The group is called The Zimmers. Their lead singer here is 90 years old. He's since passed on and more boomers have filled in the lower ranks. They had a run on both Britain's Got Talent and America's Got Talent and people really love them. It's appropriate that their first number is The Who's "Talkin' 'bout My Generation".
These guys are really fun and the song is on my mp3 player don't ya' know!
And THAT my friend was the world's oldest Rock Band. They are collectively 3000 years old between them. I find that inspiring and encouraging.
I actually got unfriended by someone the other day. It's actually not that unusual for me. I tend to be on the outspoken side of the conversational spectrum and there are some folks who cannot bear to be contradicted. It's not just politics. I've lost both hard left and hard right "friends" who apparently were only friends so long as I did not bring up any good points when I disagreed with them.
My musical tastes are distinctly unserious, though I can blubber along over a sad love song with the best of them. Of course one of my favorites, "I've Got Tears in My Ears From Lying on My Back, Crying My Heart Out Over You" probably crosses over several musical genres in a way unlikely to draw it any Grammy or CMA awards.
One of my favorite unserious, yet at the same time strangely poignant musicians, is the inimitable Garrison Keillor, star to the long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. That Keillor makes a living with a live radio show is a testament to both his talent and mule-headedness in this era of on-demand videos and Mp3 players.
This Keillor song addresses the issue I brought up in the first paragraph of this weblog - unfriending. In true Garrison Keillor fashion, the song gently sticks a pin in the over-inflated self-importance of the Facebook Generation. I liked it so much that I put it on my Mp3 player!
Here's another version (he changes them almost every performance. This is the funniest one and the one that I have on my Mp3 player.
In case you need further confusion, here's the family tree chart!
I love this song for it's fascinating take on Appalachian dating customs. You have to listen to this song very carefully on you'll get lost. The thing is, it could actually happen legally. In fact, as I've examined the places where my own family tree branches up into the European aristocracy, I find that some of the branches at the top do tend to grow together. In fact I have one multiple great grandmother whose maternal and paternal grandmothers were the same woman, but that's another story altogether and no longer legal in the United States. The unique thing about this song is that no one violates any U.S. laws in this song.
A lot of old-time bluegrass and country singers have picked up this song, originally written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe. Their group, the Jesters, did it in 1947 after it was first performed by country humor duo, Lonzo and Oscar. Lonzo and Oscar were a kind of 40s version of the 50s duo Homer and Jethro. A lot of famous people took a run at the song. Guy Lombardo and his trio did it in 1948, followed by Phil Harris (who later was the voice of Baloo the Bear in Disney's Jungle Book), Jo Stafford who reversed the sexes and made her her own grandmaw, Kimball Coburn (whoever that is),Jon Mark and Alun Davies in the 60s as well as Willie Nelson, Grandpa Jones and the inimitable Ray Stevens. The Muppets even took a swing at the song. Others, too numerous to enumerate, also took a whack at the song and there was even a Robert Heinlein science fiction short story, All You Zombies in which the deed was done with considerably greater genetic and legal ambiguity by a hermaphrodite time traveler. Tom Arnold even did a version of the story in his movie The Stupids.
Here is the Lonzo and Oscar version from a 50s country TV show my grandmother likely watched religiously.
And wouldn't you know it? The whole thing got started thanks to an anecdote told by American humorist extraordinaire, Mark Twain. Click the links above if you want to hear the other versions of this classic bit of American humor. It's not so popular among the Europe nobility, for some reason. Apparently, the royals don't see what's so danged funny about it.
