Saturday, April 27, 2019

Rose Murphy, "The Chee Chee Girl"

Rose Murphy, "The Chee Chee Girl"

Rose Murphy
1913-1989

Her recording career spans most of the 1940's to 1963 with original releases on AFRS Jubilee, Majestic, Mercury, Victor, Decca, Verve, United Artists, Regina plus one last session cut in 1980 in Nice, France for Black & Blue.  She is best known for her high-pitched singing style, which incorporated scat singing, giggling, and percussive sound effects.

Nicknamed the Chee Chee Girl:
“People asked me to sing a song and I didn't know the lyrics,” said Miss Murphy. “So all of a sudden the “cheechee” sound came to me. I was just kidding around. But people kept saying, “do ‘chee-chee.’ “ It's just part of me. It doesn't mean anything.”
Get it



Monday, April 22, 2019

South Street


Fran Cooper

Twin Hits 5009



South Street

Twin Hits
was operated by Barney Young and Gloria Parker.   Barney was a music publisher, composer, personal manager, lawyer, and song plugger.  Gloria, who was his co-composer, star performer, and fiancee, was a versatile bandleader, contralto, marimbist, and musical glasses virtuoso.  
 
Covering the hits of the day, the recordings by pseudonymous artists were produced by Ed Chalpin for his PPX Enterprises set-up.
 
Barney Young died in 1969. Miss Gloria Parker's official website is here
 



Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Please Don't Leave Me


Tommy "Skinny" Ellsworth

"Please Don't Leave Me"
(Antoine Domino, Reeve Music, Inc. BMI)

Baro Record #2627

Tommy Ellsworth, birth name Thomas E. Nazziola, also recorded with his Rockin' Jesters on the Oklahoma, Scot and Romaine labels.  He is also quite possibly Ray Ellsworth singing "Rock And Roll Show" on his own Ellsworth label.

"Rock And Roll Show" has been available on several compilations, but a label to see is still elusive.




Friday, April 5, 2019

I Cried



Baker Knight
& The Knightmares


I Cried

Kit Records, Inc. SO 901
Al Bubis Productions
1956

Thomas Baker Knight, Jr.
(1933-2005)

Baker Knight's songwriting has overshadowed his long career as a singer of rock 'n' roll, pop and country. Born of Scots ancestry in 1933, Knight grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where he attended high school, spent one year at the University of Alabama (after serving in the US Air Force for three years) and became a technical illustrator after a course at a local art school. He had learned to play guitar in the school orchestra, B.B. King being his first idol. In 1955 Knight formed a rock 'n' roll band, Baker Knight and the Knightmares. Soon they recorded their first single, "Bop Boogie To the Blues"/"Little Heart", for the Nashville-based Kit label, owned by Alan Bubis. A second Kit single, "Bring My Cadillac Back" (1956), sold well enough to be picked up by a major label, Decca, and might even have become a national hit, had it not been banned by many radio stations that saw the disc as a free commercial for Cadillac.
...more reading...


Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Chew Chew Chew!


Hollygley Records
presents

From Blibber-Blubber (Smack!)
to Dubble Bubble (Thwack!)
Dedicated to all who have chewed it, detonated it,
swallowed it, left it underfoot, parked it under tables
and stored it used in the refrigerator

With thanks to Robert Hendrickson, author The Great American Chewing Gum Book (1976)


Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Sam Pan Sue


John Osborne and band


Stepping Out To


Sam Pan Sue
Every sign on this "High-Fi  / C & W /Made in Detroit" record says "song-poem record" :

–  the label : previously active in 1963-1965, the Lectron issued at least four records, all pressed by Rite Records in Cincinnati (Cara Stewart, The Cones, Mary Kaye)
–  Margie Bish,  songwriter of both sides, had few songs issued on the Preview label
–  Active Music (ASCAP) was the publishing wing of Jack Curry's Air label, operating from 3170 SW 8th Street, Miami, Florida

But the otherwise unknown John Osborne doesn't sound to me quite like a song-poem singer ?

Archer Record Pressing from 1968.  

Monday, April 1, 2019

Putzie Putz The Octopus


Geene Courtney
MGM 12712
1958



Putzie Putz The Octopus

Geene Courtney, Miss Sausage Queen (1955)


Geene Courtney was born Geene Radko in Pennsylvania in 1921. Model, starlet, entertainer and singer, Geene was also an advertising-oriented beauty queen whose titles included New York Miss Cheesecake of 1951 and Miss Sausage Queen of 1955. 

Geene passed away on July 6, 2000 in a nursing home in Saxonburg, Pa.

Her only record (I think)

Que Dor Eu Sinto [What A Pain I Feel]





From Wikipedia (edited):

DamiĆ£o Ferreira da Cruz (1935?-2016), better known by his stage name DamiĆ£o ExperienƧa,was a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, multi-instrumentalist, record producer and compulsive hoarder. Considered to be a major name of the Brazilian countercultural scene and one of the country's most famous and prolific outsider musicians, he was praised [and] constantly compared to schizophrenic outsider artist Arthur Bispo do RosĆ”rio and musicians Frank Zappa, Moondog, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Jandek and Father Yod.  His albums, usually sold by him in the streets or even handed out for free when he felt like it, became much-sought collector's items, and his reclusive, eccentric and unpretentious personality has attained him a passionate cult following.

He experienced an unhappy childhood and was constantly mistreated by his parents, which led him to run away from home to Rio de Janeiro when he was between 10 and 13 years old. As a youth he served as a radar operator for the Brazilian Navy; while in the Navy he allegedly fell off a ship's crow's nest, hitting his head on the floor, which could have provoked his erratic mental state.

After his precocious retirement from the Navy in 1963, he went on to live with a prostitute in a stilt house in the vicinity of the bairro of EstƔcio, became a pimp and was able to produce his records thanks to money obtained via procuring

DamiĆ£o's musical style is impossible to categorize accurately, since he experiments with numerous genres, more prominently freak folk, psychedelic rock, reggae and experimental rock. His songs have no logical sense at first sight, and mostly of them are sung in a dialect created by him, the "Planet Lamma dialect" (spoken in his eponymous "home planet"), with improvised lyrics.

He usually plays different instruments and sings at the same time. In his earlier releases, DamiĆ£o used exclusively guitars with different numbers of strings (e.g., his debut Planeta Lamma was played with an one-string guitar), harmonicas, shakers and occasionally marimbas, mixing Portuguese with his own dialect in his lyrics.



Full album available here