HyperBob's blog

Bonzo classic with reduced chords

More Flanagan and Allen

Old Flanagan and Allen song completely messed up... but still good fun.

THEM STAMP LICKERS:

How about them stamp lickers, ain't they champs?
Drool, slurp, slobber, lickin' them stamps.
Lickin' them green stamps, lickin' them blue.
Lickin' that paper. Eatin' that glue.
Look at them stamp lickers, ain't they gung ho?
Lickin' them thrift stamps with they tongue like a yoyo
Them lolly goggle stamp lickers, ain't they a rage?
Stickin' them licky stamps on that page.
How to be a stamp licker? Don't need a ticket.
Get a stamp or two, juice up and lick it!

Them Moose goosers by Mason Williams

How about them Moose goosers, Ain't they recluse?
Up in them boondocks, goosin' them moose
Goosin' them huge moose, goosin' them tiny,
Goosin them medow moose in they hinny!
Look at them Moose goosers, Ain't they dumb?
Some use an umbrella, some use they thumb.
Them obtuse Moose goosers, sneakin' through the woods,
pokin' they snoozey moose in they goods,
How to be a Moose gooser? It'll turn you puce;
Get your gooser loose, and rouse a drowsy moose!

and for the redneck recitation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrmgnUtYw6g

Get all of the "Them" poems here
http://www.lazyka.com/linernotes/thesongs/ThemPoems.htm

"The Nearness of You" is a popular song, written in 1938 by Hoagy Carmichael with lyrics by Ned Washington. The biggest selling 1938 version was recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, with a vocal by Ray Eberle.




Ben Mealer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP8z8RXKD2A

Boundless
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWVmpJtIRvo

Kimberley Aviso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZepsLJgEU4

Liz Cole
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_j_4jWSPYs

Always thought this was a sad sort of song. Least when Judy Garland did it in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. When presented with the original draft lyric, Garland, her co-star Tom Drake and director Vincente Minnelli criticized the song as depressing.

Though he initially resisted, songwriter Hugh Martin made several changes to
make the song more upbeat. For example, the lines

"It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past" became
"Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight"

My daughter bought me tickets to go to the opera for my birthday. This is my report. The opera was Doctor Atomic.

Amphetamine driven Red-neck patriotic anthem, high speed, LO-FI recording, with crackling, pixilated video, bad sound, and bonus Orange hunting cap framing, vintage Ray Ban horn-rim specs, from the 60's.... you can't be serious????

"Love Is the Seventh Wave" was the second single and second track from Sting's 1985 solo debut album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. The song is supposedly about love being the seventh wave, or the strongest wave in a series of waves, thus wiping out any sort of problems.

I really do wonder if there is any empirical scientific evidence that the 7th wave is the strongest... or is it just some urban legend started by some Cabalistic numerologists.

Headphones on or you have not listened

And now for something completely different.

It has perplexed me as to what exactly is a "shimmy". From the song itself I always imagined that it was something you did with the posterior regions of the body, but I was wrong. A shimmy is a dance move in which the body is held still, except for the shoulders, which are alternated back and forth. When the right shoulder goes back, the left one comes forward. Thus the move is calculated to draw attention to the upper part of the body, full front and centre. and the bosom in particular.

The following disscussion took place on the Ukulel Cosmos regarding the origins of the song. It is an interesting read... especially the bit about ham-bone kicking.

Laurence Bergreen's biography of Louis Armstrong An Extravagant Life says that when Louis joined Kid Ory's band he was asked to come up with a number he could feature in. He came up with "an unashamedly filthy thing" called, variously, "Keep Off Katie's Head" or "Take Your Finger Outta Katie's Ass", possibly inspired by Kate Townsend, a Storyville madam who'd been barbarously murdered years before.

Part of it went:

Why don't you keep off Katie's head?
Why don't you keep out of Katie's bed?
It's a shame to say this very day
She's like a little child at play.
It's a shame how you're lying on her head,
I thought sure you would kill her dead.
Why don't you be nice, boy, and take my advice?
Keep off Katie's head I mean, Get out of Katie's bed.

Notice the similarity to "Take Your Fingers Off It" which has a similar but shorter structure:

Take your fingers off it, keep your big mitts down,
Take your fingers off it, keep your big mitts down,
Take your fingers off it, you know you can't touch it,
You know it don't belong to you.

The song was a success and one night Louis noticed someone writing the tune on music paper as fast as it was being performed. Clarence Williams (for it was he) offered Louis $25 for the song, and as Louis was very keen to buy a coat he'd seen, he agreed. However Clarence Williams never returned with the money. Clarence was the first important black music entrepreneur in New Orleans, and had the inspiration of the ham kick. He suspended a ham from the ceiling of a venue and invited the women present to kick it. Whoever succeeded won the ham - the catch was that the women could not wear underclothes during the contest.

The idea caught on, and pretty soon knickerless women were kicking hams all over town. There was even a Ham Kicker's Club. Williams and Armand Piron, a violinist, opened the first black-owned music publishing business in New Orleans and in 1919, they published the song. They changed the music slightly, cleaned up the lyrics and called it "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate". Credit for music and lyrics was claimed by Piron alone. Williams and Piron made an absolute fortune from it. In 1924, eight years after Clarence Williams had written it down while Louis sang it in Pete Lala's, the two men met again, this time in a recording studio.

"I waited and I watched, but all during those sessions Clarence never made a move to pay me the twenty-five," Louis said.

Sidney Bechet recalls in his autobiography Treat It Gentle that Piron wanted to join ASCAP (American royalty payments) as Sister Kate was such a success. Clarence Williams engineered membership and Piron looked forward to a more secure future as his health declined. Expecting royalties in thousands of dollars, he didn't know that the initial payment would be just a few dollars, the automatic first payment for any member of ASCAP. Bechet says that Piron went "out of his mind.... he couldn't believe it, and that was the end of Piron".

From I Remember Jazz by Al Rose (In 1939, four years before Piron died Al Rose visited him in New Orleans):

I asked Piron about a piece that was copyrighted in his name, I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, noting that Louis Armstrong had recently said Piron had stolen it from him. Piron's attitude toward Satch was patronizing, but understanding. "Of course," he assured me, "that's not Louis' tune or mine or Pete's either. That tune is older than all of us. People always put different words to it. Some of them were too dirty to say in polite company." He sang me one brief and obscene version. "The way Louis did it didn't have anything to do with his Sister Kate":

Gotta have 'em before it's too late,
They shake like jelly on a plate.
Big 'n juicy, soft an' round,
Sweetest ones I ever found.

"That's the way Louis sang it, his words. Well you know, there's just so many places you could do a number like that. Not in my band, you know. We never did anything like that. Now it's true we used the "jelly on a plate," but who knows if Louis made that up himself? The published words - at least the title - Peter made up. Most of the rest of it was Steve Lewis and me. Steve worked out the band routine."

Big instrumental version followed by vocals in a different style by Hugh Laurie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiNpjhvr97M

Eric "Slowhand Clapton and Dr John... is that bossa nova blues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJA21UmUquI

The one and only Louis Armstrong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXMx8OW32Bs

Tom and Jules

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrzHJbZ9AUE

Best Ukulele version by MrJaynickel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0CEVmgSbGw

A song about Peter Kürten written by Randy Newman done tango style.

A work song, "Pay Me My Money Down" originated among the stevedores working in the Georgia Sea Islands. It was collected by Lydia Parrish and published in her 1942 book, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands:

Pay me, Oh pay me,
Pay me my money down.
Pay me or go to jail,
Pay me my money down.

It was brought back to public attention by Bruce Springstein through the 2006 big band folk album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTF2ZkqCa4M

But for my money I would go for the Ukulele version By Todd Baio (Doogey9). It swings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ub3N3kIgzc

Lew Dite also does a good Uke version but at a different tempo which he learnt from the Weavers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPmJ4ylKLY

I suppose the song is about getting paid a good wage for the work you do and not being cheated in anyway. However in the present economic climate you can work hard all your life and at the end of it discover that your pension has gone up in smoke because of mis-management by a bank or an investment company, so I wrote some new verses for the modern age that I can relate to.

There is always bailouts and bonus's for the banks, but for the individual anything you own will be taxed, and what little you have will be taken away from you.

Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.
~Mr. Miyagi, The Next Karate Kid, 1994

Dancing: the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music. ~George Bernard Shaw

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.
~Martha Graham

There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
~Vicki Baum

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.
~Faith Whittlesey

Do you think dyslexic people have difficulty dancing to "Y.M.C.A."?
~Dave Sokolowski

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
~Kurt Vonnegut

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
~John Wain

To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak.
~Hopi Indian Saying

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
~William James

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
~Charles Baudelaire

Dancing is nothing but dreaming with your feet!
~Constanze

Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.
~Christopher Morley

There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good. ~Edwin Denby

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.
~Friedrich Nietzsche