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.