Paul Newman and his Plastic Jesus

Paul Newman died at his home near Westport, Connecticut yesterday. He’s going to be memorialized over the next week or so on TV as well as in magazines, newspapers and countless blogs such as this, and for more reasons than most of us could imagine.

His philanthropic work would be at the top of my list, followed by the way he was able to channel the adversities in his life into something positive, such as losing his son Scott to a drug and alcohol overdose and starting a foundation to fund drug awareness education. There’s no question in my mind that he’s going to “move forward” to a better life next time.

However, this blog is intended to memorialize the amusing, entertaining and oddball items of the audio (and perhaps at some point visual) realm, so what we have today is a clip of him from the film Cool Hand Luke, “singing” a song that I’ve known for decades but have never heard an actual released recording of.

To quote Gunther Anderson's website that I stumbled across this morning while researching the song: "There is considerable debate about the actual authorship of this song, with partisans leaning to Ernie Marrs, Ed Cromarty and George Rush (the Goldcoast Singers), and to old revival-tent spirituals. It seems that the original was in fact the Goldcoast Singers, but in the context of a fake spiritual radio broadcast, including only two verses and no chorus. Marrs developed it into a much more complete song, and apparently took credit."

You can find the "original" lyrics, the guitar chords and a cornucopia of verses that have been added by different people on his site, as well. If someone has a different version of any merit I’d be most pleased to hear it. Feel free to leave a link in the comments section.

Thanks for this version of “Plastic Jesus”, Paul.

Uncle Josh at the Bug house

I was 19 when I first lay eyes on this 78, so it wasn’t my first novelty record, by a long shot. It was most likely one of the earliest ones that my mother heard, though. The phonograph was in the living room when she was a child in Minnesota, on what we’ve always heard referred to as “the farm up North”. Mom tells me the children weren’t allowed to play in the living room so her rare opportunities to play around with the phonograph and the small stack of 78 RPM discs was when “the folks” would leave town, as they’d do a few times a year to go visit relatives in neighboring states.

By the time I first saw the surviving selections they fit into a couple of 35mm film canisters; one had been painted an eggshell white and decorated with an appliqué. How those came into the family I’ll never know, but they held an assortment of discs from the turn of the century, most of the dates between 1900 and 1910, should memory serve (as it does less and less these days). Many were nearly played out from the weight of the heavy tone arm that tortured them with a steel needle each time they were played; some were so old as to be single-sided, the blank side often sporting a gummed label from the music store it had come home from.

During the last couple decades of his lifetime Cal Stewart (1856-1919) made quite a few recordings of his widely performed vaudeville routines as Uncle Josh Weathersby, beginning with some cylinders for Thomas Edison's studio about 1897 and continuing with RCA and Columbia up until his death at the end of 1919. The 78 from my grandparent’s cabin was “Uncle Josh at the Bug house,” about his stay in a rooming house owned by a family named Bug ("I'm kinda hungry, guess I'll have another potato, Bug!"). Our disc was the Columbia version (ca 1907) but he recorded different versions both before (on Edison cylinder, ca 1901) and after.

Stewart’s stories were punctuated throughout with his infectious laugh that still gets me, more often than not. The recording is old and worn, but you can still make out the story. Here's “Uncle Josh at the Bug house”.

Although we only had the one 78, Stewart’s other recordings have been widely circulated, are easily found online and well worth a listen. The second example here was early enough to be done on cylinder some time before his stay at the Bug house.

“Uncle Josh in a Chinese laundry” might fly no farther today than the ill-advised Abercrombie and Fitch laundry T-shirts did a few years ago (they were only on store shelves the morning of their release before being yanked) but as a simple humor reference it’s entertaining. This recording is in the public domain but comes courtesy of the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.

The last one for today is from 1919, making it one of his last recordings. Since classical and opera has long been a favorite with many in my family it’s only fitting to include “Uncle Josh at the Opera”.

These recordings are in the public domain but the last two come courtesy of the University of California Santa Barbara Library, noted here at their request.

A 45 from the mid-50s – an early novelty

Lalo Gurrero is considered to be a pioneer in Mexican and Chicano music. Sadly, he passed on in 2005 - about six weeks before my own father did. His son Mark has an extensive amount of info about his father at his web site - and it's a fascinating read.

Some of Lalo’s recordings are still readily available (again I suggest you do some looking around on Mark's web site), and for those of you with kids there is the delightful work he did back around 1995 with Los Lobos on the CD called “Papa’s Dream”.

Not only an extremely talented singer/songwriter with hundreds of songs to his credit he also had a sense of humor that led him to create a number of topical parodies along the way, including one about the hot Disney phenomenon of the mid-1950s, “Davy Crocket” called “Pancho Lopez.”. One of my older brothers brought this 45 home and we played the hell out of it. It needed some serious cleaning up but is now worthy of a listen. Here it is…

Here's the scratchy lead-in part of the groove...

In an earlier life - back when a great night out consisted of getting high and wandering through the aisles of one or both of the two Tower Records within striking distance of my home - I, like many others, spent what was then a small fortune collecting vinyl records. Unlike many who have since seen reason I still have all of them. Not only the 3,000+ LPs, but a good half-thousand 45s, several hundred 78s and some 16 & 2/3 RPM radio discs (wish me luck turning them into digital files).

What's a middle-aged man also living with a couple of thousand CDs doing with all of this vinyl, you ask? That question almost answers itself if you stop to think of it: moving them from place to place - and not much else. I've hardly set stylus to plastic in a half a decade... but that's about to change. By "about to" I mean within the next few months, if luck holds.

I've browsed through several hundred other music blogs over the past few months, some far out of my technical league, some an absolute delight and some just hatchet jobs. I'll most likely borrow some of the parts that have been a help or pleasure for me to use and maybe make this a spot you'll drop in and visit every so often. I hope so... it's what will make the effort worthwhile.

Having invested in a new turntable with a USB umbilical cord, I'm prepared to begin the process of converting them to a form more easily moved (and accessed) and will be putting some of it out there for others to hear, rather like I did for friends who would come to visit for an evening of audio weirdness until they staggered out my door while I, trying to play just one more section of the evening's long, spiraled groove for them would call out "Wait! Wait! Just listen to this and then go!"