How Can I Keep from Singing?

 My daughter is currently working on a song about Alzheimers. There’s cheerful for you. But it is a known fact that, as memory disappears, the ability to sing and remember songs stays a lot longer than other things. So in care homes, having singers come in to sing the old songs is real therapy. When I started in care homes many years ago as a health worker, the age group meant it was all songs from the Second World War. Now it seems to be Elvis impersonators.

A song about memory loss could perhaps slide into a version of an old song, originally a hymn and then a civil rights anthem – How can I keep from singing? Sometimes thought of as an old Shaker hymn; actually it is not. But the refrain “How can I keep from singing?” seems to fit the idea of my daughter’s song.

So, many years after I last wrote humorous verse (and even got paid for it occasionally) I had a rusty try at using the verse and chorus to fit the end of my daughter’s song.

As colours merge in misty shades

And to the past we’re clinging

Though memory dims and recall fades

How can I keep from singing?

So we may we feel as visions dark

And silent calm ‘tis bringing

A final time, we make our mark

How can I keep from singing?

 

All together now…

Tom Dooley

 In 1958 an unknown group called the Kingston Trio (so named because of their love of calypso music) issued an album. One track was picked up by a DJ in Salt Lake City and given repeated plays, turning it into a single: Tom Dooley.

Hang down your head Tom Dooley.

Hang down your head and cry,

Hang down your head Tom Dooley,

For boy you’re bound to die.

It was a song that had travelled down through the ages based – vaguely – on a true event, the execution of Tom Dooley (real name Tom Dula) in 1868.

Tom Dula was a confederate soldier in the American civil war, although he spent much of his time as a prisoner of war. Both before the war and straight after his release he had various sexual encounters, which included three sisters or cousins, Laura, Anne and Pauline Foster. Anne was married at the time, but this didn’t seem to deter Tom. Into this ménage à troi (plus extras) someone introduced “soldier’s joy” (venereal desease) and they all caught it. Various complications and jealousies led to Laura disappearing, reportedly pregnant. Pauline led a search party to Laura’s shallow grave, and she and Anne were arrested. Tom legged it, but was caught and brought back. Ultimately, it was Tom and Anne who went on trial for murder and the case received huge publicity. Tom was convicted; his lawyer managed to get a new trial, but the second trial eighteen months later, still found him guilty. Before his execution he wrote out a statement that cleared Anne, and she was released. She later died from syphilis-induced insanity. Some believe that she was the real murderer and Tom took the blame to save her.

A song about messy relationships and venereal disease was hardly likely to make the hit parade, so a greatly sanitized version was recorded by the Kingstons. It was a huge hit, over six million copies of the single were sold. The Trio got a Grammy award in 1958 for best Country and Western record – and the next year when a Folk award was introduced, they got another Grammy for the same song. They also got a lawsuit when they claimed composer credits for the song.

The Kingston Trio became huge for a few years – they were to have five longplaying albums in the American top twenty album charts at one time.

However, they were not everyone’s cup of tea. Nik Cohn’s entertaining book written in 1968, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom gave them short shrift:

“Beaming all over their toothpaste faces, the Kingston Trio would dig up some old warhorse like Tom Dooley, full of stabbings and hangings, and turn it into a Shirley Temple nursery rhyme.”

The Kingstons received this kind of stick throughout much of their career. As they often remarked in interviews – somewhat testily – they didn’t believe in deliberately singing badly just to please the purists.

They actually sparked a musical revolution in the mainstream, where hordes of American college kids suddently discovered and embraced “folk music”. It was similar in the UK with Lonnie Donegan and skiffle.

The movement quickly evolved with female singers like Joan Baez, Caroline Hester, and Judy Collins. A young Jewish boy with adenoids called Robert Zinnerman changed his name to Bob Dylan, ‘borrowed’ the tune of an old song No More Auction Block – put in some new and suitably vague words and Blowin’ in the Wind was born. The song was taken to great heights by Peter Paul and Mary – a group manufactured by business interests just as much as the Monkees and Spice Girls were years later, but somehow they sounded more ‘authentic’ than the Kingstons.

Soon folk was everywhere. Middle-aged folkies like Pete Seeger, who’d been singing away for decades, suddenly entered the mainstream and got prestigious gigs.

Ultimately it morfed into folk rock, which meant adding both electric instruments and percussion behind the performance. That in turn – mixed with a folk hybrid, the blues – had a huge effect on rock in general. Perhaps the biggest result was that lyrics could now cover any subject under the sun.

Now there were lyrics to really make you think.

If only you could hear them.

But for many, a starting point was the clean cut smiles of the Kingston Trio.

So hang down your head Tom Dooley.

All together now.

Unexplained Paranormal Activity

Nick Reynolds

 Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio was short. John Stewart (fellow member) regularly ribbed him in live performances. Among the one-liners I have on tapes of live shows:

Nick hurt himself yesterday - he fell off a rug.

He’s not really that short, it’s only make-up.

Nick was on the stretch-bar reading his copy of “Sex and the Single Dwarf.”

He punched me in the knee.

All very politically incorrect, but they were great friends in real life. Stewart had his ultimately fatal stroke while visiting Reynolds’ home.

A review intended for IMDB

Review for GIRL’S TOWN

SEE Harold Lloyd Jr fall from a great height – and die! (There must have been an in-joke there!).

SEE Paul Anka sing Ave Maria to Mamie Van Doren and make her cry. (The effect on the viewer may be somewhat different). SEE the Platters sing – but without lead singer Tony Williams. A stand-in mimes his vocals just off camera or with his face hidden by less than subtle camera work. (What was the real story there?). SEE Mel Torme as one of the oldest film teenagers in the business get punched out by genuine teen Paul Anka. SEE the offspring of Charlie Chaplin, Robert Mitchum and Bing Crosby in small roles to illustrate why their film careers sank without trace. In the annals of bad film making, what more could you ask for?

Ten Best Radio Plays

It was only when I was recently thinning down the accumulation of paper filling my home that I came across a run of a paper called "The Circular Note" which ran for 38 issues, and was devoted to collectors of radio drama. Many items now playing in the UK on Radio 4 Extra are only available because collectors home taped them (illegally) at the time of original broadcast. The BBC in its wisdom junked most of its output and it only the work of enthusiasts that preserved what we still have from the past.

The club that produced "The Circular Note" still exists, but is now internet only.

Anyhow, in issue 28 of the paper (August 2005) I came across an article I'd written, and frankly had forgotten about. This post resurrects it.

MY TEN FAVOURITE RADIO PLAYS

(for US readers make that "favorite...")

One of the difficulties in listing my top ten plays, is that other members have already beaten me to it. A few years ago Rod Beacham's "Inter-City Contract" was listed in an article, and I would automatically have included that amongst my own favourites. Someone also included John Mair's "Never Come Back" in their list with its anti-hero on the run - Richard Hanney as a rat. That too is a play I come back to repeatedly. So I have to cheat really. This list is my top twelve - those two and ten others!

1. The Day of the Triffids

(Serial in 6 parts - 2-10-1957 to 20-11-1957)

I am indebted to contacts in the VRPCC for obtaining a copy of this vintage serial from 1957. The first time around, as a 12 year old I hung on every word. My school-friends were hooked on "Journey Into Space" but that passed me by. However, I made a date with "Triffids" each week and it  sent me to the book by John Wyndham. Listening to it today (compared with more recent versions) it still has an impact.

2. The Hollow Man. (1959)

(SNT - 10-1-1959)

The fairly recent series of Gideon Fell mysteries starring Donald Sinden have had their moments, although the last suffered from the restrictions of a one hour time slot. John Dickson Carr's plots have enough twists and turns to fill an hour and a half without any difficulty. However, from the opening jokey music the Donald Sinden versions are played somewhat tongue in cheek. The original rendition of "The Hollow Man" from 1959 with Norman Shelley as Fell was played straight, and apart from a slight touch of the 'theatricals' in one or two performances, stands up well today.   My Saturdays in the late 1950s always involved playing out with friends in the daytime, a quick early tea and out to the local flea-pit cinema, and finally home to bed with the valve portable radio by the pillow listening to Saturday Night Theatre in the dark. This sacrosanct routine was soundly trashed when the BBC in its wisdom brought the starting time for SNT forward from 9.15 pm to 8.30 pm. (At that stage of life the cinema won.) "The Hollow Man", with its background of convicts escaping from buried coffins, and not one but two impossible murders - both observed by independent witnesses but with a rational explanation at the end - started me off as a collector of Carr's fiction, which I read avidly for years.

John Dickson Carr was a prolific writer of radio plays himself in the 1940s, and some of his playscripts have been published in recent years. Sadly, very few tapes have surfaced.

3. You Have Been Warned.

(Serial in 6 parts - 19-2-1958 to 26-3-1958)

Another John Dickson Carr tale from the novel "The Reader is Warned", this time from his output as Carter Dickson. A man named Herman Pennik claims that he can cause people to drop dead just by thought - which he calls "Teleforce" - and apparently succeeds in doing so. A named victim is seen to twitch and fall over with no-one touching him, and there are no signs of foul play when the body is examined. Needless to say Pennik is nowhere near at the time. How could it happen? Who would be next? Could it be used to eliminate Hitler or Mussolini? (The play was set in 1939.) As the play appears lost, I only have memory to go on, but the concept was that there you were at home listening - and horror of horrors - Pennik could choose YOU next... The user of "Teleforce" - ultimately more victim than villain was played by Irish actor Patrick Magee. His voice of subtle menace always brought back memories of "You Have Been Warned" when he turned up in various films over the next twenty-five years.

4. He Wouldn't Kill Patience

(SNT - 4-4-1959)

 A final Carr thriller, again from the Carter Dickson output, and again one that seems to be lost. Patience is a small tree snake. Her keeper apparently commits suicide. The room in which he gasses himself is locked from the inside, and completely sealed up from the inside, even down to sticky paper over cracks in doors and windows. But - Patience, the pet tree snake also dies in its cage in the room. Even if he had committed suicide, he wouldn't kill Patience... How was it done? Felix Felton had another rich fruity voice, akin to Norman Shelley, to play amateur sleuth Sir Henry Merrivale, a slightly more humorous version of Gideon Fell.

John Dickson Carr wrote over twenty novels under the Carter Dickson banner. To my knowledge, apart from the two above, only the Carr ones seem to have been taken up by dramatisers. They would be worth some enterprising adapter to consider.

5. The Last Renaissance Man

(SNT - 14-6-1986)

A nicely moving thriller by T D Webster about fake antiques and murder, with a stirring bit of Vivaldi as the theme music. For some reason this has become a generic comfort blanket in our household. If someone takes to their bed with flu, "The Last Renaissance Man" invariably makes the playlist.

6. The Wench is Dead

(SNT - 21-3-92)

John Shrapnel played Morse in three excellent radio versions of Colin Dexter's novels in the 1990s. It is a great shame there were not more. These adaptations were far more faithful to Colin Dexter's novels than the TV series with John Thaw. (There was a feeling of déjà-vu when Shrapnel turned up as a main character in one of the TV episodes opposite John Thaw in "Death Is Now My Neighbour".)

All three plays - "Last Seen Wearing", "The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn" and "The Wench is Dead" are excellent. I have chosen "The Wench is Dead" because the TV version seemed to stray even further from the novel than usual, even eliminating Sergeant Lewis. The main plot device (policeman stuck in hospital solves ancient crime) is a steal from Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" - which was turned into another excellent play starring Peter Gilmore as Inspector Grant.

7. Speckled Band

(Probably 4-9-1962)

This Conan Doyle story, is a token of the Carlton Hobbes and Norman Shelley partnership as Holmes and Watson. A grand staple of Children's Hour until the adults complained that it was on too early for them. A simple production, depending enormously on the projected voices of the actors. It was apparently recorded on several occasions by Hobbes and Shelley, with different supporting casts. My version is the one issued on the BBC Radio Collection.

8. Enquiry

(Afternoon Theatre - 19-19-1979)

From the very opening words of actor Tony Osoba "Yesterday, I lost my licence" - this adaptation of a Dick Francis novel rumbles away at a fast pace and the hour and a half speeds by. They must have had great fun in the studio staging the fight with the hero's demented nemesis at the end. Our off-air recording was virtually worn out by the time the BBC issued it with "Bonecrack" - another excellent play starring Francis Matthews - in the BBC Radio Collection.

9. Daughters in Law

(SNT - 2-9-1961)

This stands for the whole Henry Cecil output. His books had pages of humorous dialogue that translated effortlessly into radio drama. A protracted legal case about a borrowed lawn-mower, starring two veteran actors, Cecil Parker and Naunton Wayne.

10. A Shilling for Candles

(Saturday Play - c.2000)

 Strictly speaking this play should illustrate much of what is wrong with modern radio drama. Pared down to just an hour, with much of Josephine Tey's novel jettisoned, this free adaptation changes both the murderer and the explanation for the title in the original. (Just minor details really...) However, in spite of this, it trundles along with much good humour (including several references to superior drama on the "wireless") and a number of set pieces that could have featured in an Alfred Hitchcock film. Hitchcock in fact filmed the novel as "Young and Innocent" in 1938 and also took drastic liberties in his version. But taken on its own, it is a modern play that I have enjoyed hearing again and again.

 

A personal delight when compiling this review has been to dig out all the plays (where available) and listen to them again. It also reminded the family that, while reading tastes might include "great literature" our listening tastes remain more limited. As long as the play featured a murder or mystery of some sort, and ideally included a policeman or detective in the cast-list - we would be sure to listen in and tape it.

Social distancing walk in the park

As taken by Mrs. O.