The Homer & Jethro Project #9

I'm not so fresh on my math, so I'm still trying to figure out how to make the current number of posts fit into the number of days for Spring of 2018.
There's got to be a fairly simple way of figuring it out, but I'm currently to under-caffeinated and hungry to get a good answer right now.

Anyway, here's Post #9

Here's a nice promo photo of Homer and Jethro from, I'm guessing, around 1950 based on the singles advertised on the back. The last few gasping breaths of vaudeville.

But it wasn't all funny business.

June 1949 - RCA 21-0087 - Homer Haynes - Waltz With Me/Roll Along Kentucky  Moon



There appeared in 1949 a completely straight up country crooner by Homer Haynes.

It's a nice pair of tunes really. Well played and with some nice Chet Atkins guitar work & a Jethro mandolin solo, but it's hard not to listen to it and wait for the jokes that don't come to arrive. And Homer even had a hand in the writing of it.

It was a pretty noble experiment that didn't really pan out.

And while I was hunting for some info on that one I came across a recording of Red Sovine singing "I Wanted You For a Lifetime" that was another weepy ballad penned by Homer. The more I look the more there is to find apparently.

Another 78 rpm from the collection.


Another hard to find oddity from around this time is this one:

March 1950 - RCA 599-9049 - Spike Jones & his City Slickers - Come Josephine in My Flying Machine/Fiddle Faddle (w/Homer & Jethro)

This is a weird one. It appears that this collaboration with novelty band leader Spike Jones was recorded March 10, 1950 I couldn't seem to find anything close to a contemporary release for it despite appearing on a number of Spike Jones compilations over the years. (It was also at this session that they recorded "Pal-Yat-Chee" with Spike that would see release a few years later and slated for Post #23.)

The first (H & J-less) song is yet another updated pre-WWI chestnut "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" that had a cylinder recording by Billy Murray (here with Ada Jones) recorded in 1911 and less than a decade after the Wright Brothers first historic flight at Kitty Hawk

The B side where Homer & Jethro make their appearance is a take on Light Classical composer Leroy Anderson. The tune is "Fiddle Faddle" which received its inaugural recording at the hands of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops in 1947.

I did finally manage to track down its existence to a small box set of 10 seven inches released in 1955 amongst a host of easy listening favorites for dining and dancing. For the purposes of this exercise I only digitized the two Spike Jones tracks but hold in reserve the option of doing the entire box at some point and posting it on an upcoming Compilation 13th of the Month post.

You have been warned.