Author: Kim Simpson

“All His Children” (1971) – Charley Pride with Henry Mancini * Written by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, and Henry Mancini * Produced by Jack Clement * LP: Sometimes a Great Notion (soundtrack) * 45 B-side: “You’ll Still Be the One * Label: Decca (LP); RCA (45) * Charts: #92 (Billboard Hot 100); #2 (Billboard country)

The 1971 Paul Newman film Sometimes a Great Notion (which had the much better overseas title of Never Give an Inch) put Ken Kesey’s Oregon logging novel to the big screen. If early seventies media tended to splash its feet in post-sixties cultural bewilderment, this film submerged itself, with every development—all the way to the closing credits—feeling like a gasping lunge through political and interpersonal complexity. Charley Pride’s forgettable theme song, written by composers who otherwise excelled in memorability, seemed to betray their low estimation of the country genre. The oddly-paired billing of Pride and Mancini (who gave the arrangement scoopfuls of stock background vocals) only added to the entire project’s murkiness. What makes “All His Children” special, though, is Pride’s final note, which sputters with knowing exasperation. 

“Home at Last” (1968) – James Brown * Written by Rudy Toombs * Produced by James Brown *  LP: Thinking About Little Willie John and Other Nice Things * Label: King

In his Godfather of Soul autobiography, James Brown writes of being in awe of Little Willie John and how his efforts to upstage the seasoned R&B hit maker at the Apollo Theater were crucial to his evolution as a performer. The rivalry forged a kinship that strengthened during their years as label mates at King. In the mid-sixties, John went to prison for manslaughter after an altercation at his own engagement party in Seattle. Brown worked to get him out on parole, only to see him put back after violating the terms (by leaving Washington state to visit Los Angeles). John’s 1968 death of illness while incarcerated hit Brown hard, prompting the release of Thinking About Little Willie John and Other Nice Things—one side of covers and one side of quickie instrumentals—the same year. A standout track is “Home at Last,” a 1956 R&B hit (#6) for John written by Rudy Toombs (who’d also penned the classics “Teardrops from My Eyes” and “One Mint Julep”). It’s a straightforward blues jumper about a “country girl” who fixes her man’s “breakfast, lunch, and dinner right on time,” but even in the act of paying tribute, James Brown works for the upstage, turning his version into the most memorable one. Listen to him scat at 4:00.

“Dawn” (1970) – Lovecraft * Written by Marty Grebb and Ken Wolfson * Produced by Lovecraft * LP: Valley of the Moon * Label: Reprise

After two albums, the psychedelic San Francisco-via-Chicago band H.P. Lovecraft, who had taken more than titular inspiration from the influential horror author, reinvented itself in 1970 as Lovecraft, with a personnel reshuffle bringing in former Buckingham Marty Grebb. Although their Valley of the Moon avoided the aural creepiness of their former incarnation, you could still detect a San Francisco rock hall vibe. The first section of the song “Dawn,” for example, borrows from the spacey, dangling guitar sound of pre-1970 Grateful Dead, with whom they’d shared the bill a time or two. Maybe the Dead’s Bob Weir took some inspiration from this song’s opening section for his distinctive “Playin’ in the Band” intro (introduced in 1971). Listen to the sequence at :43. “Dawn” can also be remembered for chiming in on Vietnam: “why do we fight this war of fools?”

“Round, Round Hitler’s Grave” (1942) – The Almanac Singers * Written by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Millard Lampell * Produced by Alan Lomax * Album: Dear Mr. President * Label: Keynote

For their Dear Mr. President mini album (three 78 RPM discs with one track per side), the Almanac Singers, who were Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell, and Lee Hays, stepped aside momentarily from their pro-union/anti-war focus, showing solidarity with the nation’s post-Pearl Harbor response to the Axis powers’ declaration of war. On the title track, Pete Seeger sings, “we got to lick Hitler now, and until we do, other things can wait.” The album’s most rousing track is “Round, Round Hitler’s Grave,” sung to the melody of “Old Joe Clark,” in which the four pacifists yearn to get a “rope around” Der Fuehrer’s neck.

“Gotta Go Home” (1979) – Boney M. * Written by Frank Farian, Fred Jay, Heinz Huth, and Jurgen Huth * Produced by Frank Farian * UK 45: “Gotta Go Home” / “El Lute” * LP: Oceans of Fantasy * Label: Atlantic * Charts: UK #12

Boney M. were a Eurodisco phenomenon (with only five minor hits in the US) created by German pop wiz Frank Farian, the same man who’d later create Milli Vanilli to so much eventual sturm und drang. What’s funny is that although a modicum of sleuthing would have revealed in the disco seventies that front man Bobby Farrell lip synced Farian’s vocals, it’s safe to assume no one would have felt outrage in the midst of an era so comfortable with pop artifice. And what infectious pop artifice it was—”Gotta Get Away” revamped an already catchy German single (“Hallo Bimmelbahn”) by the group Nighttrain, giving it new English words and magic steel pan drum hooks. Two Canadian DJs called Duck Sauce would revamp the tune even more in 2010, turning it into the bonkers dance hit “Barbra Streisand.” (Giving the general sentiment of “Gotta Go Home” more meaning was the B-side, a tribute to the erudite Spanish prisoner Eleuterio Sánchez, who had become a cause célèbre. Two years after, he’d be pardoned and released. How’s that for pop artifice?)

“Tankeros Love” (1975) – Kivikasvot * Written by Ismo Sajakorpi * FIN 45: “Tankeros Love” / “Hoi Laari Lii” * Label: Rondo

Seventies Finland went crazy for garbled English, and a catalyst for this was Foreign Minister Ahti Karjalainen. A career politician, he held the post three separate times in the sixties and seventies, with his final stint happening between 1972 and 1975. He was famous for botching his English utterances. At a visit to a Kenyan zoo, where a sign said “all animals are dangerous,” he reported to his colleagues that all of the animals were of the “dangerou” family, pronounced with his strong Finnish accent as “tankero.” A torrent of Finnish jokes about the mysterious “tankero” animal burst forth and the term still survives in the Finnish lexicon in reference to mishandled English. A 1975 single by the group Kivikasvot (stone faces), who were a TV comedy/vocal troupe comprised of men with otherwise separate careers (including the hit maker known as Fredi), capitalized on the tankero craze and some of its accompanying jokes (“If you love me too, then I love you three, four, five”). Equally funny are the record’s self-deprecating tourist plugs (“sauna in Finland!”). Its Russian inflections likely nod to Karjalainen’s political preoccupation with Finland’s eastern neighbor.

“The Race” (1988) – Yello * Written by Boris Blank and Dieter Meier * UK 45: “The Race (video mix)” / “The Race (sporting mix)” / “Another Race” * Produced by Yello * Label: Mercury * Charts: UK singles (#7), US dance (#33)

When you attach the description of “dance duo” to images of the two severe-looking Swiss men who formed Yello, you laugh. The music’s funny, too, but the humor never diluted any of their muscular club-clout. When “The Race” revved up in 1988, with its myriad remixes, clock-in times, and a video showcasing their distinctive visages, they’d already become global discotheque vets with such tracks as “I Love You” (1983) and “Oh Yeah” (1985). Its instrumental hook came directly from Gino Soccio’s “The Dancer,” a disco smash from 1979, which either accounted for Yello’s dance chart success or confirmed Soccio’s absence from recent memory.

“Got My Mojo Working” (1960) – Muddy Waters * Written by McKinley Morganfield * LP: Muddy Waters At Newport 1960 * Label: Chess

Muddy Waters’s canonized At Newport 1960 album can’t shake a lingering strangeness. The cover depicts the blues giant, who otherwise played at Smitty’s Corner at smoky midnight in Chicago’s south side, serenading an audience against an afternoon sky. The quiet crowd responses confirm what you imagine—that the audience is a polite, buttoned-down sort. On side 2, when Waters first sings “I got my mojo working, but it just won’t work on you,” he may have been wondering if he was experiencing one of the realest scenarios for those words. The mojo eventually does get working, though, as the crowd livens up. They had other reasons for their reserved behavior, it turns out. As the liner notes explain: some “beer-inflamed youngsters” had disrupted Ray Charles’s show the day before, causing a riot that involved the National Guard, and forced the cancellation of the rest of the festival except for Waters’s Sunday afternoon slot. The link below takes you to actual footage of the song, complete with Waters dancing the jitterbug at the end. (“Got My Mojo Working” is credited on the album to McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, but the copyright actually belongs to Preston “Red” Foster, a matter that had later been settled out of court.)

“Blowin’ in the Wind” (2001) – Kek Lang * Written by Bob Dylan * LP: Chants from Kek Lang: Summer Moons, Winter Moons, Romany Songs * Label: Long Distance

In 2013, the Buda Musique label based in France released a compilation called From Another World: A Tribute to Bob Dylan with an eye-catching cover featuring an image of Dylan’s profile as the borders of a nation. It comes off as a visual joke—no Dylan nation could be conceivable for such a border-defying body of work. A standout track among that CD’s rather exotic offerings, though, is this Hungarian gypsy folk version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” by the group Kek Lang, originally released in 2001 on the French Long Distance label. You’ll need to listen well beyond the one-minute mark, when the tempo picks up and the euphoria kicks in.

“That Lonely Feeling” (1965) – Dean Ford and the Gaylords * Written by John Carter and Ken Lewis * 45: “The Name Game” / “That Lonely Feeling” * Label: Columbia

This Scottish group became the Marmalade around 1966, right after which they recorded their “I See the Rain,” an alleged spark for Jimi Hendrix’s arrangement of “Hey Joe.” By 1968, they were a UK hit-making machine, with a cover of the Beatles’ “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” reaching #1 in the UK and their elegiac “Reflections of My Life” (1970) reaching #10 in the US. As Dean Ford and the Gaylords, though, one of their standout tracks was a B-side called “That Lonely Feeling.” Although Scottish female duo the McKinleys had recorded it in 1963, this later version is a throwback slice of early Beatle balladry with a golden guitar solo.