Monday, February 11, 2013

Red Rose Tea




no artist credit


Gink Records

As heard on the Zeke Jackson Show
Distributed exclusively by Record Rama
Route 8, Etna, Penna.
1968

From a TV commercial recorded in 1960


(1) British acrobat Gene Detroy (real name Samuel Wood 1909-1986) billed as the “Vagabond Of The Wire,” earned his living in the 1940s as a tightrope walker in the English Music Halls and carnivals. To keep him company, Detroy adopted a pet chimpanzee. When a featured act on the program failed to show, it was suggested that Detroy go onstage with his chimp. They were a resounding hit, so it wasn’t long before other chimps were recruited. Detroy named the new act Marquis and Family, because he thought it sounded elegant.

(2) In 1960 the Marquis Chimps, Enoch, Susie, Baron and Hans were signed to appear in a trio of television commercials......

(3) .......for Brooke Bond Foods, makers of Red Rose Tea. The commercials featured the chimps in parodies of a Wild West shoot out, a golf match and the most popular, a wild nightclub with a swinging chimp band singing the praises of Red Rose Tea.

(4) In 1968, WARO Pittsburgh DJ Zeke Jackson played the music track of the Red Rose Tea commercial on his radio show. Jackson received so many requests for the crazy tune that he and ......

(5) ........local record collector Paul Mawhinney pressed and sold one thousand 45 rpm records, which quickly sold out. 

The disk was released under the GINK label, named after the DJ’s mother-in-law (not pictured) and featuring the same song on the flip side.

How many record labels were named after a mother-in-law, I wonder.  Not many I guess.

The whole story of the Red Rose Tea commercial is told by Ed Golik HERE and has a video of the commercial as seen on TV.



Audio file from Collector CD "Rockin' Your Way" (CLCD 4497, 2006)



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