A friend of mine asked me if I could help ID this song. It was a piece of music in the old TV series, Crime Story from the eighties (set in the sixties). It’s kind of a slowly, bluesy acoustic song.
Neither Shazam nor SoundHound could identify it, nor could my aging brain, although it does sound familiar. Any ideas? You can hear a clip of it right here:
Did you look at the fan comments on IMDB? There are tons of threads there, and if I know anything about fanboy/girls, it’s that someone has a fan list of songs. It’s a blues song obviously, but my googlefu wasn’t up to the task.
I did a search on the transcribed lyrics and came up empty. I suspect the song was written for the show.
It may sound familiar because the song is formulaic. The lyrics are pretty generic, and the music is similar to a lot of New Orleans R&B numbers.
I did a search for “crime story” on ascap.com and came up with several hits, but I didn’t take the trouble to look further. You can do the search yourself here.
Yes, that’s the exact song that it makes me think of, too! I’ve had that very song running through my head ever since I started this search. But it’s not quite it.
The music director for “Crime Story” was the great Al Kooper. It wouldn’t surprise me if that wasn’t a little something Kooper tossed off for the episode - sounds like he may be singing it as well.
Wow!! That didn’t take long! Here is Al Kooper’s reply:
Beats the shit out of me BUT i have a solution.
When they released the DVD of the show, they took out ALL the records I selected for each episode and replaced them with dogshit homemade records they didn’t have to pay royalties for. It truly ruined each episode but it saved them money.
Does this sound familiar ???
P.S, They kept the score I wrote but all the records were replaced