No particular theme to this VA playlist: From John D. Loudermilk to Piano Red (aka, Willie Lee Perryman, aka Dr. Feelgood), from Villa-Lobos to Julius Fucik to Carole King, and from Si Zentner to Leadbelly to Pat Boone, it's pretty much any LP track or single I've looked at recently and said, "This would make a nice post."  Or a portion thereof.  Any VA playlist featuring the Checkers, Larry Williams, and Tony Bennett is (in my utterly unbiased viewpoint) a playlist to be cherished. In addition to Bud Shank's jazz take on I Am the Walrus, there are at least three oth ..read more

NOTE: My April 18, 1918 text, with a new link.  Thanks for musican1979 for reminding me to revive this: So, why did I buy this Goodwill album?  Well, after going through eight or nine boxes, I'd picked a small group of LPs and 45s.  My brother-in-law was standing next to me.  I thought this jacket was kind of cool (it is--surprisingly so for a cheapo label), so I held it up and said, "Do I want this?"  "Yes, you want this," he replied.  So I bought it. The label is Hollywood, and here Hollywood is pulling the standard budget-label read-the-smaller-print scam: a ..read more

  Don't let the cover scare you: This is terrific country-gospel quartet singing, and this quartet has already seen time at this blog, though the earlier link is now kaput, thanks to Workupload.  But here are some group pics from the previous post (alliteration unintended), plus my explanation... Quoting me: "We can assume we're seeing the four singers plus three musicians. (I've never understood why 'musicians' doesn't include singers. It should.) I don't think we have a family group this time, though (going by another Conveyors LP), it seems the group was headed by a husband ..read more

  Internet sources give 1949 as the release year for this boxed set, despite the 1948 date on the cover.  And, in fact, the matrix numbers for the 78 rpm set reveal that these were recorded in 1947.  Anyway, I'll go with the release year, though I sometimes favor the recording date.  It's always a toss-up. "Music has many powers, but scarcely any more potent than the ability to evoke in the listener dozens of personal memories, some of them romantic, some amusing, some poignant, and many of them half-forgotten until brought to vivid life by some melody."  In the re ..read more

So, what do we call phrases like "happy banjos"?  Are they an example of anthropomorphizing or personifying?  (Clock ticking; buzzer.)  Right!  Personifying!  In this case, we're talking the happy sound of banjos, which is a human perception/experience.  As personified in the form of "happy banjos." Aren't you glad I cleared that up?  And this was a problem LP.  Namely, with some bad engineering on Side 1, plus all-over-the-place Googling required to determine the probable recording dates.  I had to do some comparison listening, at least for o ..read more

  Joyous Easter music, rescued from Workupload exile.  As you can see, the bunnies are excited.  A mix of secular and sacred, though many (most?) details of Easter were, at some point in time, religious.  In All Around the Year (1994), Jack Santino (a former prof of mine) writes about Easter eggs as "natural symbols of birth, new life, resurrection, and renewal," and we won't even mention bunnies (rabbits) as symbols of fertility.  Except, I just did.  But Easter eggs, come 2024, are regarded as "secular" in nature.  (Actually, most eggs have no professed r ..read more

Sorry for my longer-than-planned absence.  Today's offering is from the mood-music/easy-listening radio heyday, though these are reissued 78s, not airchecks.  This appears to be the second edition of this reissue, and I have a dim memory of once owning the earlier Camden LP.  As ever, I love the "How This Record Value is Possible" bit on the RCA Camden back jacket: It amounts to, "We're doing you a favor by offering older-catalog material."  No, we're doing RCA a favor by keeping its back catalog profitable.  Then again, "Here's some older stuff, priced down becaus ..read more

  Of course, I'd hoped to have this up yesterday (Sunday), and I might have succeeded if the originals were in average-to-above condition.  But sacred shellac of the late 1920s has a far lower probability of showing up in decent shape than "pop" 78s. But I did manage to get twelve sides good to go for this Monday.  The two "guest" artists are Rev, J.C. Burnett and His Quartet with the "folk" version of Will the Circle Be Unbroken (which, far as I can determine, is a variant on the 1907 Ada Habershon-Charles Gabriel hymn).  That, or the 1907 hymn followed from a folk sou ..read more

  Finally, my promised Sammy Kaye post--1962's New Twists on Old Favorites--and sorry it took so long.  And, the big question: Do I like it?  Did it please your blogger?  I'm not sure, really.  However, I am impressed by how brilliantly this succeeds in its primary mission: The merging of Sammy Kaye's "sweet band" (aka, "Mickey") style with that 1960 and 1962 dance craze which heralded a new era of popular music.  That is, if you believe in the contemporary hype.  In my mind, the question remains: Why was this particular dance, the music for which was stan ..read more

I promised to get to Sammy Kaye (and, yes, musicman1979--it's his contribution to the twist-ploitation craze), and I will, but for today we have a light concert (aka, light music) post, all ripped from 12-inch 78s in my collection and spanning the years from (let's see) 1934 to 1946.   We start with the four selections (!) of the two-disc Andre Kostelanetz set, Exotic Music (1946), whose standout track is the roots-of-exotica selection Lotus Land, composed by Cyril Scott in 1905.  From the liner notes: "Lotus Land finds its story in the Odyssey of Homer.  Duri ..read more