One of the most enjoyable aspects of compiling music for this blog has been discovering (or re-discovering) music, artists or companies that are now all-but forgotten. In the song-poem field this happens all the time: although the American Song-Poem Music Archive is exhaustive it hasn’t been updated for almost a decade, and collectors are constantly turning up new recordings. During the years I’ve been collecting song-poems I’ve ‘found’ at least four companies not listed there or on any other song-poem resource, including Circle-D(with at least two Rod Rogers/Rodd Keithreleases), Globe imprints HFC and Kandee, and 50s New York outfit Vanity. I’ve also discovered UK companies who licensed song-poem material – Emerald (a Decca imprint) and Polydor offshoot Nashville.
You all know Marcy Tigner: she’s the Christian trombonist-turned vent act who releases a slew (anything up to 40) albums under the Marcyor Little Marcy tag. You know this. You also know that before she was encouraged to take up ventriloquism that she released a couple of instrumental albums under her own name.
Yet I doubt if many of you knew that, between her brace of trombone albums and the first Marcyrelease, she released a bizarre, three-track EP under her own name using her own, odd, childlike voice rather than employing her later shtick of masquerading as a wooden dolly. Get Googling: pretty much all you’ll find are links to the eBay auction for the very EP I now own. None of the Marcy fan sites mention it: none of the weirdo music blogs I frequent seem to have featured it. A genuine rarity: the real missing link. Dating from the very early 1960s I guess.
Here, in its entirety, are the three tracks from that EP: Marcy Tigner’s version of the standard Mairsie Dotes, plus Me and My Teddy Bear and Shake Me, I Rattle. None of the songs are credited: Mairsie Dotes is a novelty song composed in 1943 by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston; Shake Me, I Rattle (written by Hal Hackady and Charles Naylor) has been recorded a number of times, including in 1958 by the Lennon Sisters and by Marion Worth in 1962. Me and My Teddy Bear (Winters-Cootes) has been recorded by dozens of artists – including those as disparate as Mitch Miller and Peter Gabriel.
Enjoy!