Perhaps the oddest thing about this very cool tune by Desmond Dekker & The Aces is that the lyrics are very nearly indecipherable. “The Israelites” was written by Dekker and Leslie King. It peaked on the charts in 1969 as the first ska No. 1 in the UK and “among the first to reach the US top ten.”
Here’s a great example of mis-hearing lyrics:
The opening line, “Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir” was often misheard, one example being “Wake up in the morning, baked beans for breakfast”.
The impact of “The Israelites” can never be overstated. It was the first of the island’s releases in history to achieve an international breakthrough . . . Of course, other Caribbean artists had found fame abroad, but Desmond Dekker was the first to do so with a totally undiluted Jamaican sound.
A cool and very recognizable tune.
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I would have thought this one to be a lot older, but no. It was written by David Rose in 1958, and released in 1962.
In addition to “The Stripper,” Rose wrote “Holiday for Strings,” and “Calypso Melody.” He also wrote music for many television shows under the pseudonym Ray Llewellyn.
“The Stripper” became a hit through one of those crazy little circumstances that happens in the recording world. David Rose had recorded “Ebb Tide” as the A-side of a single. They needed a B-side but Rose happened not to be around so something from his catalog was chosen by a low-level staffer.
“The Stripper” reached number one on Billboard’s Top 100 chart in July, 1962. Billboard ranked the record as the No. 5 song of 1962.
Gunilla Knutson
It’s a very recognizable piece of music and has been used in all sorts of contexts over the years. I remember it being used by Monty Python’s Flying Circus and for a Noxzema commercial featuring Swedish model Gunilla Knutson in which she tells men to “Take it off! Take it off! Take it all off! I actually met Ms. Knutson while I was working for a community cable TV station in New York back in the ’70s. Fascinating, I know. Well, that’s her to the left, so at the time it wasn’t nothing.
For obvious reasons, “The Stripper” has been cited as one of the best burlesque striptease songs of all time, which is probably why it sounds like it comes from a different era.
Ah, to recall a time when a good striptease song could top the charts.
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In my search to learn about big band leaders of whom I had not been previously aware, I came across the name Teddy Powell. Mr Powell (1905-1993) was a jazz guitarist, composer and big band leader who had significant success in New York for a brief period of time in 1939. The emphasis here is on “brief.”
For a brief period in 1939, Teddy Powell led one of the top big bands in jazz. With an ensemble full of top musicians, Powell had a very successful six-week run at the Famous Door in New York. Powell bragged that he had done in a short time what it taken Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey years to accomplish. But once he took his band on the road, the lack of name recognition resulted in small crowds, money began to be lost and the more notable sidemen left for other lucrative jobs. The fantasy was quickly over!
Before the band foundered they did record some notable sides including: “Teddy’s Boogie Woogie,” “Pussy in the Corner.” “Flea On a Spree,” and “The Sphinx,” every one an original by Powell, composed with Ben Homer.
At various times band members included: Irving Fazola, Pete Mondello, John Austin, Nick Caizza, Carmen Mastren, Ely Davis, Hugh Brown, S.J. Kramer, John Popa, Jerry Shane, and Irwin Berken. Powell left band-leading in 1954 and formed a music publishing company in New York City, which did well.
I guess for every big bander leader more widely known, there are a few who never really made it.
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Published in 1910, “Some of These Days” was written and composed by Shelton Brooks and is most associated with legendary performer Sophie Tucker who recorded it several times beginning in 1911. The best known of her versions was done in 1926 backed by Ted Lewis – a number one hit on the charts for five weeks beginning November 23, 1926.
Versions have been cut by Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, The McGuire Sisters, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, Charley Patton, and Sidney Bechet.
The Biography website provides this brief description of Sophie Tucker, indicating she
was born on January 13, 1886, in Ukraine and her parents immigrated to the United States when she was a child. During her youth, Tucker sang at her mother’s Hartford restaurant to entertain diners. Her professional career began in 1906, when she performed in blackface at the old Music Hall in New York City. Tucker also performed in burlesque and vaudeville and performed in several films, including Honky Tonk (1929). She died in 1966.
The Wikipedia entry further notes that Tucker was “known for her powerful delivery of comical and risqué songs,” and that “she was one of the most popular entertainers in America during the first half of the 20th century. She was widely known by the nickname “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas”. Shelton Brooks (1886 – 1975) is described as “an African-American-Canadian born composer of popular music and jazz, who wrote some of the biggest hits of the first third of the 20th century.” In addition to “Some of These Days,” Brooks is credited with “At the Darktown Stutters Ball,” “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone,” “Every Day,” “Somewhere in France,” “Swing That Thing,” “That Man of Mine” and “There’ll Come A Time.”
Not exactly sure what this clip was done for, but the audio is quite good.
In his book, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America, Charles Hamm lists “The Last Rose of Summer” as among the Top Selling Foreign Songs in America in 1870.
The lyrics are from a poem by Irish poet Thomas Moore written in 1805. The poem was then set to a traditional tune called “Aislean an Oigfear” (The Young Man’s Dream). Many of the recorded versions are what one would expect: Bing Crosby, Clannad, Sara Brightman, Charlotte Church, Celtic Women, James Gallway, etc. There also appear to be over 30 classical settings. Still others are a bit outre like versions by Judas Priest, Tom Waits, and Nina Simone as below.
Impossible to know what Moore would have thought of the various interpretations, but the Simone version from a 1964 album called Broadway, Blues, Ballads, is my favourite.
And, by the way, if you, like me, upon hearing the song, especially with the orchestration, think it sounds a bit familiar in another context, think the main theme from the Notre Dame football classic “Rudy,” with music by Jerry Goldsmith. I can’t be wrong about this, having seen the movie at least a dozen times. For fun I’ve included it at the bottom. Judge for yourself.
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“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” is of course one of the, if not the, most recognizable songs of the Depression Era. The words are by Yip Harburg (1896-1981), the music by Jay Gorney (1896-1990). It was written in 1932 as part of a review called Americana.
Any way you look at it, it is a song with strong political overtones about a guy who did what was expected of him, worked hard, built his own American Dream only to be thwarted by circumstances beyond his control.
By 1929, the Depression had been going on for three years and so many, like the singer in the song, had been reduced to begging to get by. The lyrics touch on the plight of farmers, construction workers, those who worked on the railroad, and finally those who had served their country in wartime as among those who had been forgotten. What would not have been lost at the time is the lyric referring to “Yankee Doodle Dum” and the evocation of the bonus marchers who came to Washington, D.C. looking for a promised payment of a post-WWII bonus only to be dispersed by military force.
As Harburg said in a 1974 interview:
I didn’t want a song to depress people. I wanted to write a song to make people think. It isn’t a hand-me-out song of ‘give me a dime, I’m starving, I’m bitter, it wasn’t that kind of sentimentality’…the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends? The song doesn’t reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human being, asking questions—and a bit outraged, too, as he should be.”
With that kind of motivation behind the song, it is not surprising that many Republicans at the time considered it to be anti-capitalist propaganda, which almost got it dropped from the production. Similarly, business leaders attempted to exert influence to keep it off the radio because, as William Zinsser put it, it was “sympathetic to the unemployed.” In the end, their efforts were unsuccessful because of its popularity. This is, by the way, what Karl Marx would have called a contradiction of capitalism, something that expresses a negative view of the capitalist system but is allowed to exist, and is even promoted, because it’s making somebody money.
I should note, however, that although Harburg was never a member of the Communist Party, he was blacklisted from working in his chosen field for twelve years between 1950-1962.
“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” has been widely covered by artists like Tom Waits and Judy Collins and has become an established part of our culture signifying hard times that come to hard working people through no fault of their own – an idea that many people seem to think is dangerous.
“My Heart is a Hobo” is a ballad written by Johnny Burke (lyrics) (1908-1964) and Jimmy Van Heusen (music) (1913-1990) for the 1947 movie musical Welcome Stranger. Bing Crosby, playing a young doctor, sings the song in a scene that finds him gone fishing in a small town with an older doctor played by Barry Fitzgerald. As Bing sings it, his “heart is a hobo” because he “loves to roam through fields of clover” and ‘hates to have to think things over.” Think here of a lazy country mood Bing Crosby was just made for.
The plot summary is as follows.
Crusty Dr. McRory of Fallbridge, Maine hires a replacement for his vacation sight unseen. Alas, he and young singing doctor Jim Pearson don’t hit it off; but Pearson is delighted to stay, once he meets teacher Trudy Mason. The locals, taking their cue from McRory, cold-shoulder Pearson, especially Trudy’s stuffy fiancée. But then, guess who needs an emergency appendectomy? IMDB
If you prefer a more succinct summary, TCM describes it like this: “A small-town doctor resents the presence of a new younger physician and his newfangled ways.” In either case, hilarity ensues.
Another song from the film, “As Long as I’m Dreaming” was moderately successful beyond the movie, while Billboard magazine wrote at the time that other songs featured, including “My Heart is a Hobo,” have “production value only.” I assume that means it was entertaining only in the context of the film.
It would seem that a lot of pleasant enough music written by bona fide music writing superstars, even for box office smashes, didn’t travel well outside the theatre. I wonder if the songwriters had the same expectation. That said, beside Crosby, Tex Beneke, Lena Horne, and Rosemary Clooney each recorded it. More than a few must have liked it.
I’ve chosen the Lena Horne version for the bonus track. Seems to work a bit better with a faster tempo big band arrangement behind it.
“I Want To Be Loved (But Only By You)” is a 1947 ballad recorded by Savannah Churchill. The single was Churchill’s most successful release on the R&B charts, reaching number one, and staying there for 8 weeks. It settled at 22 on the for year 1947. It also reached 21 on the U.S. pop charts.
It was Churchill’s third release on the Manor label and her first with vocal group backing (the Sentimentalists, who would shortly thereafter rename themselves the Four Tunes). While the record label indicates that Churchill wrote this song, William “Pat” Best, a member of The Sentimentalists, was the actual author.
Savannah Churchill (1915-1974) performed pop, jazz, and blues music in the 1940s and 1950s.
An active performer, she toured America and got mobbed in some places, a true star of her times. In 1948 she did a music video (or cameo) in the movie Miracle in Harlem with the Lynn Proctor Trio accompanying her on “I Want to Be Loved.” She landed an acting/singing part in Souls of Sin, directed by Powell Lindsay and co-starring Jimmy Wright and Billie Allen, the following year…Arco Records promoted her as “Sex-Sational,” and released seven Savannah Churchill singles from 1949 to 1950 recorded with the likes of the Red Norva Quintet, the Four Tunes, and the Striders.
Sadly, her career more or less ended when a drunk fell on her from the balcony while she was performing in 1956. Though she died many years later, she never fully recovered.
Cole Porter wrote “I Get a Kick Out of You” for a 1931 Broadway show, Star Dust, which never got produced. The song was, however, later used in Porter’s Broadway show Anything Goes in 1934, sung by Ethel Merman. Other notable tunes to come out of that production were “All Through the Night,” “You’re the Top,” and “Anything Goes.” Quite the show.
In 1936, a musical film version was produced, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, Charles Ruggles, and Ida Lupino. For the record, this is the plot:
A young man falls in love with a beautiful blonde. When he sees her being forced onto a luxury liner, he decides to follow and rescue her. However, he discovers that she is an English heiress who ran away from home and is now being returned to England. He also discovers that his boss is on the ship. To avoid discovery, he disguises himself as the gangster accomplice of a minister, who is actually a gangster on the run from the law.
The one thing about this song that “I Get a Kick Out of You” that has always struck me is the way the reference to cocaine comes and go depending on which version one is is hearing. And there’s a good reason for that. It’s called the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 or the Hays office (William H. Hays was the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America). The code was a set of industry guidelines which asked, and got, self-censorship of the content of U.S. movies released by major studios from 1934 to 1968. The origin of the Hays Code, and the reason the industry fell into line is that, after what were thought to be some particularly risque films and some notable scandals, an image makeover was needed. For a long time, movies got “cleaner.”
Here are some highlights of what the code “suggested,” the interpretation of which must have been a nightmare.
The technique of murder shall be done in a way that will not inspire imitation.
Brutal killings shall not be presented in detail.
Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.
Theft, robbery, safecracking and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc., should not be detailed in method.
Arson must be subject to the same safeguards.
The use of firearms should be restricted to essentials.
Illegal drug traffic must never be presented.
The use of liquor in American life, when not required by the plot, or for proper characterization shall not be shown.
Thus, see number 7 above, illegal drug trafficking, such as implied by the use of cocaine, must never be presented, so that in the 1936 film, this:
Some get a kick from cocaine I‘m sure that if I took even one sniff That would bore me terrif- Ically, too Yet, I get a kick out of you
Became this:
Some like the perfume in Spain
This only applied to films, and eventually was ignored by film makers many years later, but it is the reason the reference to cocaine comes and goes depending on the version of “I Get a Kick Out of You” one is hearing. There, doesn’t that make you feel morally upright, not having to listen to that nasty lyric?
Here’s Ethel Merman with the non-offending version. Bonus track is a Sinatra take with the offending line.
Reading through Charlie Gillette’s The Sound of the City: The Classic History of Rock, I came across a reference to this Chi-lites’ hit. Beside being one of the best soul tunes of all time, it’s well known in part because of the talking intro, which, unfortunately, some radio stations felt the need to omit. That’s too bad, as it added so much to the feeling of the song.
Written by lead singer Eugene Record (1940-2005) and Barbara Acklin (1943-1998), it’s a sad song about a guy who passes his time in various mundane ways hoping his lost love will come back to him. That doesn’t happen and in a worldly-wise way our protagonist has to deal with the fact that you don’t always get want you want (to quote another song).
“Have You Seen Her” reached no. 3 on the Billboard Top 100, and got to the top of the Billboard R&B Singles chart in November of 1971.
Previous records by the group had veered between the raspy attack of the Temptations and the purity of the Miracles, but in [“Have You Seen Her”] Record found his own territory: “situation songs” presented in fine detail, and sung in a voice that switched from warm tenor to soft falsetto.
In the interest of equal time, I should note that the co-writer on the song was Barbara Acklin, a singer as well as a songwriter who had most of her success in the 1960s and 1970s. Her biggest hit as a singer was “Love Makes a Woman” (1968).
It’s a classic and was no doubt a heartache song for many.
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