Yes, I can clearly hear it. Is “Handy’s Orchestra” W. C. Handy’s?
Yes, and J. Paul Wyler who wrote the song played violin in Handy’s band. And if you want to go even further down the rabbit hole, there is a song by trumpet player Buddy Bolden from around 1906 called “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”. No recordings survive but it’s been covered dozens of times, most notably by Hank Williams in 1949.
I know the Hank Williams version. I’ve always wondered if this song had a connection to the German song “Ein Loch ist im Eimer”, which has a different melody, but also is a folk song with a chorus that means exactly the same.
There’s a chapter on Lionel Belasco’s plagiarism lawsuit over the theft of his song in Louis Nizer’s book My Life In Court. The courtroom shenanigans were…impressive. I never thought of Morey Amsterdam in the same way afterwards.
Apparently the Andrews Sisters didn’t pay close attention to what the song was about when they recorded it.
Same melody in “Richland Women Blues” (Mississippi John Hurt) and “Midnight Special” (numerous covers).
Slight sidestep… this hole in the bucket talk reminded me of a hilarious song/skit that George Gobel did on the Dean Martin show. Hole In My Bucket, worth your 4 minutes:
Buckets sure were shoddy back in the day.
I listened, and I instantly heard Singing The Blues. Wow, the old Dave Edmunds song, I thought. And that there’s a whole other story - rabbit hole warning - Singing the Blues - Wikipedia
Here’s the Dave Edmunds version for comparison.
While I’m at it, here’s a very short but (to me) intriguing rabbit hole. One of the early albums I bought (many years ago) was Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. Back then (and my opinion has never really changed) I thought the best song on it was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SWb0ShWDQg. And I remember being puzzled at the time as to why it had been written long before the rest of the album. Back then, without the interwebs, an insoluble puzzle.
Why am I following up on these things half a century later? I dunno. Worrying.
Anyway, it transpires that the original version was Bowie’s follow-up to Space Oddity. It tanked.
Personal opinion - the original version is by far the better one. No peeking - who is playing the guitar part that Ronno copied note-for-note on Aladdin Sane?
Answer: Bowie’s big pal, Marc Bolan
The rest of the story is given in the wiki page for the song - The Prettiest Star - Wikipedia
I particularly like this:
David Bowie wrote “The Prettiest Star” as a love song for Angie Barnett, reputedly playing it down the telephone as part of his proposal to her on Christmas 1969… the song is in the style of the Greek hasapiko dance as a tribute to Angie’s Cypriot ethnic origin.
j
The wiki says the original single sold less than 800 copies! Ouch!
I’ve taken a deep dive on 1950s Answer Records. The wiki article barely scratches the surface but it does include a couple of really fun ones.
The Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” was answered by Jayne Mansfield’s “That Makes It”
But my favorite is an answer record by the Bobbettes to their own song “Mr. Lee”.
(Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee)
Oh, he’s the handsomest sweetie that you ever did see
(Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee)
“Mr. Lee” was a huge hit for the Bobbettes and Atlantic Records so the label insisted that all of their records be in the style of that song. The Bobbettes (ages 12-15) got so sick of the stupid songs they had to sing, they recorded an answer to their big hit. “I Shot Mr. Lee”
I picked up my gun
And I went to his door
I picked up my gun
And I went to his door
Now Mr. Lee can tell me no more
He hollered help, help
Murder, police
The girl’s after me with a gun
Hollered help, help, murder, police
The girl’s after me with a gun
Six, seven, eight
Mr. Lee had a date
Nine, ten, eleven
Now he’s up in heaven
Shot him in the head
Boom boom, whoa oh
Shot him in the head
Boom boom, whoa oh
Atlantic fired them and they found a new label to record and release their answer song. As it climbed up the charts, Atlantic quickly pressed their recording of it to cash in.
Ever heard of ‘The Ducks’ ? I had not, until yesterday.
I stumbled across them on YouTube when I saw a ‘cover’ of Mr. Soul by The Ducks.
"The Ducks were a short-lived American rock group formed in the summer of 1977 by singer-songwriter Jeff Blackburn. The band included Bob Mosley (an original member of Moby Grape), Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, and Johnny Craviotto. The band played a series of impromptu bar gigs around the Santa Cruz area in 1977.
Young had a contract with Crazy Horse that specified he could only tour with them, and so the Ducks were required to confine themselves within the city limits so as not to tour."
Imagine how cool that would have been. Apparently Crosby and Nash even sat in a couple of times. Jeff Blackburn co-wrote "My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), penning the iconic line, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Which was famously was the last line in Curt Cobain’s suicide note.
Side note: Of that song/line, John Lennon said, “I hate it. It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. If he was talking about burning out like Sid Vicious, forget it. I don’t appreciate the worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or dead John Wayne.”
Anyway, interestingly, Blackburn doesn’t even have his own Wiki page as a (single) person.
I’ve first heard of the story of the Ducks in the Neil Young biography “Shakey” by Jimmy McDonough some twenty years ago, and back then downloaded a few bootleg MP3s, but never really listened. But last year, a compilation from their concerts was released at last. It’s quite good.
If there are any English lyrics in that (either by Solomon or Seeger), I’ll be darned if I can hear it.
As part of a project to fill in some gaps in my musical knowledge I recently listened to Pressure Machine by The Killers. I posted about it here, and I thought my succinct description of it was rather good: “snapshots of a broken Middle America, abandoned by its God and ravaged by the opioid epidemic”.
If that sounds a bit Nebraska-by-Springsteen-ish, it’s not an accident - Nebraska is freely acknowledged as an inspiration. Now, I’m sure most of us know the story about how Springsteen made demos for the album at home on his little four track studio and brought them into the big studio for the band to work up in their usual way; and in not very long everyone realized that actually the demos fitted the material far better than the band versions - so the demos were used on the album instead.
What I never knew: there were other songs in that set of demos that didn’t make it onto Nebraska. Here’s one of them:
(There appear to be multiple demo versions of the song).
The ultimate inspiration for all of this darkness is (at least in part) the Starkweather murders. They were also the inspiration for the film Badlands and a host of other songs.
j