The Homer & Jethro Project #6

#6

We do more musical history and hijinks.

Will the fun never end?

July 1948 - King 721 - Glow Worm/It's Bloody War



If you are familiar at all with this song it may be the Mills Brothers version from 1952 with the Johnny Mercer lyrics. If you're like me, maybe it's the Spike Jones version. (the first record I ever listened to regularly as a child was Spike Jones. It explains my tastes a lot, I suppose)

But it's origins are once again all the way back to a 1902 German operetta by Paul Lincke whence it was known as "Glühwürmchen" before being translated and used in a 1909 American Musical "The Girl Behind the Counter"

I'll take the H & J version myself. You can foxtrot like a mofo to it.

The B side doesn't quite go back as far. Jimmie Yates' Boll Weevils take the first stab at "It's Bloody War" in 1929 a decade after the end of WWI.

Homer & Jethro do theirs a mere three years after being mustered out of WWII, so it's perhaps a bit more fresh on their minds.

 

October 1948 - King 731 - Blue Tail Fly/All Night Long


Another oldie but questionably goodie folk song first published in 1840 that everybody may be familiar with but never quite took the time to contemplate the meaning of the lyrics. Here a slave is entrusted with shooing flies of his master until the master meets his untimely, but unmourned death when the horse he's riding is bitten by said Blue Tail Fly. It's all so much darker than you thought...

B side is a bit trickier to pin down. I'm not some kind of musicologist I just google really well. But the best I can come up with for "All Night Long" is that it's a rewrite of a much older traditional song as done in 1927 by Burnette & Rutherford.

It's most certainly not at all related to the terrible Lionel Ritchie song from 1983 that may be the first thing to come into most people's tiny minds. 

Don't confuse the two. It only leads to madness and death. 

The Homer & Jethro Project #5

Post #5

Another day, another lesson in musical history with Homer & Jethro

 

 February 1948 - King 695 - (Don't Telephone, Don't Telegraph) Tell a Woman/ Oh You Beautiful Doll



Well, looking this one up has been a nice surprise. The first version that I found was by someone who I wasn't aware of Roy Hogsed. His recording of "(Don't Telephone, Don't Telegraph) Tell a Woman" predates a hit version by Tex Williams by a couple of months and is pretty damn good. I'm going to have to look up some more stuff by him. (He also recorded "Cocaine Blues" which already makes him a winner in my book. Johnny Cash did the one most people may be familiar with from "Live at San Quentin")

The B side is "Oh You Beautiful Doll" which yet again another turn of the century hit by the first recording star Billy Murray. One has to assume that this was one of those songs that had been popular enough at the time of its release that it had seeped into the public consciousness to the extent that people just knew it by cultural osmosis in much the same way nobody needs to an introduction to "Stairway to Heaven" because it's just there hanging in the back of your mind like a cereal jingle or cartoon theme song.

April 1948 - King 701 - Gotta See Mama Every Night/It Bruised Her Somewhat


The A Side "Gotta See Mama Every Night" goes back to 1923 when risque comedienne Sophie Tucker did her version. Here's a nice BBC article that gives a pretty good overview of her life story on the eve of the 50th anniversary of her passing.

H & J add some nice barrelhouse piano and some fiddle to mix to stomp out a winner in fine vaudeville tradition.

But the B-side. Here it is. The first song attributed to Homer Haynes & Jethro Burns. It's an original about a woman with a balance problem and dignity issues. Just the ticket and probably brought the house down.