Ok, Here's the deal.
If you've been following along with this trainwreck that I humbly proffer as a blog you should already be aware that I possess a voracious if not eclectic capacity to enjoy all sorts of music, noise, weird shit, novelty songs, punk rock, jazz and general nonsense. I've threatened this particular project on more than one occasion.
The nightmare becomes reality starting today.
With this inaugural post I present a fairly comprehensive overview of the musical careers of the Country Comedy duo known as Homer and Jethro. It's by no means complete since there's always odds and ends that are hard to track down for anybody with a decades spanning career, but it's probably as comprehensive as any other batshit motherfucker is likely to pull together in your lifetime. (I mean, I bought goddamn 78s for this and I don't even have the capacity to play them) Not even Bear Family is likely to touch this stuff...
I have also spent the weeks I've been working on getting this stuff digitized and ripped and the whole freakin' nine yards slowly formulating in my mind my best defense as to why Homer and Jethro. (...blah blah blah... really exceptional musicians. Jethro Burns pretty much invents a jazz/country hybrid of playing the mandolin. Dead pan comedy, puns and bad jokes...etc...)
But then I realized I really don't have to.
I want to do this, so I will.
It's compiled from a variety of vinyl sources with most of the King sides coming from later compilations and filled in with original 78s that I tracked down and digitized at a friend's house then carefully put together in a vague-ish chronological order because I'm like that.
This has been no small project for me and even as I start typing this, I've still got some stray items on their way and have to upgrade recordings of others with recently purchased upgraded copies. It's been a process.
It currently looks to run about 66 posts that will appear for the entirety of the Spring of 2018 in the same way that last year's Fall of the Fall did or the Boyracer mania of a few years back.
So if this isn't your cup of tea, come back in June and the regular shit you've come to siphon will reemerge (including some really good stuff I picked up on a recent trip to the East Coast)
But here they are direct from the bar, Homer and Jethro...
November 1946 - King 571 - Five Minutes More/Rye Whiskey
It's probably just easier to link to their wikipedia page than to type out their life story.
They'd already existed as a duo for a decade (barring time served in uniform for WW2) by the time they released this initial record for the King Label. It's them doing a country hick parody of a song that had been a Number One hit for some guy from New Jersey who went by the name of Frank Sinatra. This was their shtick and predates Weird Al Yankovic by three entire decades.
The flip was one of those old timey folk songs given the same treatment. (Somewhere I have an odd fexi disc with Nick Cave crooning it.) but I'm going to link to Western movie star Tex Ritter's version from 1936 because I can.
I like this song. But then I like whiskey.
I'm going to pour myself a glass now....
For their next recorded foray they played it a little bit straighter for a take on a Bluegrass standard as done by the Blue Sky Boys among others and then backed it with another ancient folk tune about an insect scourge of the cotton growing South, the boll weevil which was much recorded. Tex Ritter did a nice version of this one too.
I think Homer and Jethro were probably Tex Ritter fans.
This is from an original 78 I got which still sounds better than any other versions I could scare up.
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