Tag: music

Music Throwback: I Will Survive

So you think librarians are dull? From the Library of Congress:

“The Library of Congress presents ‘Library of Congress Bibliodiscotheque’ (April 12-May 6, 2017), an unprecedented exploration of disco culture, music, dance and fashion represented in the national collections. Disco’s influence on popular music and dance since the 1970s will be in focus through film screenings, performances, interviews, and a symposium.

“The diverse lineup of programs features appearances by disco icon Gloria Gaynor, whose ‘I Will Survive’ is recognized in the National Recording Registry, fashion guru Tim Gunn, Good Morning America host Robin Roberts, photographer Bill Bernstein, scholars Alice Echols and Martin Scherzinger, and legendary disco ball maker Yolanda Baker. Gloria Gaynor and her band perform in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building on May 6th, followed by a late night disco dance party presented in association with Brightest Young Things, The Recording Academy, and the District of Columbia Library Association. Experience the Library of Congress like never before.”

I Will Survive, written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris, was originally released as the B-side to a cover version of the Righteous Brothers song Substitute, which only got to #107. That flip side got to #1 for three weeks on the Billboard pop charts in early 1979, though only up to #4 in the soul charts, and was also went to the top in the UK. “While Gaynor’s hit may, on a surface level, be about a bad breakup, the song has been adopted as a gay rights anthem and a battle cry during rough political times.” The Library of Congress deemed Gaynor’s original recording to be “culturally, historically, or artistically significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry.

LISTEN to I Will Survive

Gloria Gaynor: here or here (official), who can save your life

Emma Stone, Natalie Portman, Amy Adams, Chris Pine, and Taraji P. Henson: here

From the movie Man in the Moon: here

M is for Mill Valley, California

The song spent only a couple weeks on the lower rungs of the Billboard pop charts, peaking at #90 in 1970.

Me writing about Mill Valley is the fault of Mexican food and a famous director.

For dinner during the last week in December 2016, my bride made tacos. We hadn’t had them, either at home or in a restaurant, in months. And I – as is my wont – started singing The Taco Man, actually The Candy Man, but with a word change. You may know the 1972 hit by Sammy Davis Jr. That made her think of I’d Like To Teach the World to Sing by the New Seekers from that same year.

She also recalled a song called Mill Valley. I know LOTS of songs from the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I didn’t know this one. She even knew the lyrics!

I’m gonna talk about a place
That’s got a hold on me,
Mill Valley
A little place where life
Feels very fine and free,
Mill Valley
Where people aren’t afraid to smile
And stop and talk with you awhile,
And you can be as friendly
As you want to be.
Mill Valley!

As it turns out, a teacher named Rita Abrams wrote the song and recorded with children at the school where she was teaching, released under the name Miss Abrams and the Strawberry Point Third Grade Class. The song spent only a couple weeks on the lower rungs of the Billboard pop charts, peaking at #90 in 1970.

But it must have done better with those easy-listening stations that weren’t playing Mama Told Me Not To Come by Three Dog Night or Ball of Confusion by the Temptations, because it’s been referred to as a radio staple.

There were stories in Newsweek, Life Magazine and Rolling Stone. “Annie Liebovitz stood on top of the piano to take our picture,” the educator recalled. An album, which referred to the students as 4th graders, which they were by then, was released.

Ironically, there were 2014 stories suggesting the teacher-turned-songwriter could no longer afford to live in her Mill Valley condo because of rising real estate costs.

Rita Abrams and her class had a 45th reunion in 2015.

And the director who made the video? An obscure young director named Francis Ford Coppola, who, two years later, would be directing the film that would win the Oscar for Best Movie, The Godfather.

ABC Wednesday – Round 20

Emmylou Harris turns 70

No other mainstream star established a similarly large body of work as consistently iconoclastic, eclectic, or daring;

When a friend of mine, who was a big fan of Emmylou Harris, first heard the album Wrecking Ball in 1995, she complained that it wasn’t at all what she was expecting. She threatened to give it away, and I expressed my interest in taking it, but ultimately she held onto it.

I had quite a few Emmylou Harris LPs, and Wrecking Ball wasn’t what I expected either, but I meant that in a GOOD way. Read about the 2014 re-release.

The CMT page describes her well:
“Though other performers sold more records and earned greater fame, few had as profound an impact on contemporary music as Emmylou Harris. Blessed with a crystalline voice, a remarkable gift for phrasing, and a restless creative spirit, she traveled a singular artistic path, proudly carrying the torch of ‘cosmic American music’ passed down by her mentor, Gram Parsons. With the exception of only Neil Young — not surprisingly an occasional collaborator — no other mainstream star established a similarly large body of work as consistently iconoclastic, eclectic, or daring; even more than four decades into her career, Harris’ latter-day music remained as heartfelt, visionary, and vital as her earliest recordings.”

For her sheer range of work – from background singer, to solo artist, to duets with a range of artists including Mark Knopfler, to her best selling collaboration with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt – her distinctive sound always enhances her many projects.

I expect Eddie at Renaissance Geek will feature Emmylou Harris today.

The links below are in roughly chronological order, from the most recent.

The Traveling Kind (with Rodney Crowell)

My Name Is Emmett Till

Amazing Grace/Nearer My God To Thee (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo)

Beachcombing (with Mark Knopfler)

Flesh and Blood (with Mary Chapin Carpenter and Sheryl Crow)

Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby (with Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch)

After the Goldrush (with Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton)

1917 (with Linda Ronstadt)

Orphan Girl

Where Will I Be

Wrecking Ball

Love Still Remains

Songs from the Trio album (with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt)

Two More Bottles of Wine

Blue Kentucky Girl

Save the Last for Me

Together Again

March rambling #2: Vitiligo As Body Art

This Article Won’t Change Your Mind – “The facts on why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs.”

To End Hate, We Gotta Walk the Talk – Aristotle on Why Professing Liberal Values is Nowhere Near Enough

Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood and When a no-knock drug raid ends in death, is it capital murder or self-defense? Two cases in Texas took different paths

This Is How Your Hyperpartisan Political News Gets Made

Meet The Homeless Man Who Stopped Thousands Of People Becoming HIV-Positive

Is America’s Military Big Enough?

Amazing Disgrace: How did a thrice-married, Biblically illiterate sexual predator—hijack the religious right?

When He Is Ignorant of His Own Ignorance

Elmo From ‘Sesame Street’ Learns He’s Fired Because Of Budget Cuts

“PrOtEsT” – Poet Activists Throughout the Years

How the Choctaws Saved the Irish

Waiter fired after asking Latinas for ‘proof of residency’ at upscale Huntington Beach eatery

War On The Moon

In the Congressional Fight Over Slavery, Decorum Went Out the Door

Scott Pelley is pulling no punches on the nightly news

For 15 Years, New Orleans Was Divided Into Three Separate Cities

This is what happens to your body when you stop having sex

7 Tips to Get Someone with Alzheimer’s to Take a Bath

First-year residents shadow nurses in effort to better understand, foster future communication

List of inventors killed by their own inventions

Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions in Overtime Dispute

Sweden is tackling its throwaway culture

Six Bad Ass Librarians from Pop Culture

The True Story of the Backward Index

Ask A Cartoonist: Women Who Inspire

Rest in peace, Chuck Barris

Rules for the Black Birdwatcher – With Drew Lanham and Extreme Birdwatching

The 21 most spectacular theaters in the U.S.

Vitiligo As Body Art

Troy native making movie about his hitchhiking adventure – Don Rittner

How Jaquandor made Gluten-Free Fried Chicken

Amtrak snow-motion

A STREET CAR NA_ED DESIRE

Now I Know: The Haircut that Went to War (Maybe) and What They Did Not See and Why People Originally Didn’t “Like” Cigarettes and The Invisible Wall Around Most of Manhattan and The Masterpiece Hidden in Plain Sight

Music

Before and After Chuck Berry and 15 great covers of Chuck Berry classics

Makeba – Jain

Bohemian Rhapsody Played by 100+-year-old fairground organ

10 Female Jazz Musicians You Need To Know

K-Chuck Radio: Feeling kinda “horny”

A New Thelonious Monk Album Emerges From the Soundtrack to a Classic French Film

Godsmack Play A Cover Of ‘Come Together’

Paul McCartney’s “Ram” Reconsidered

Lightning Strikes – Klaus Nomi (1981)

Understanding Deal Breakers: The Psychology of Music and Romance

Never heard of that band – oh, THEM!

Lonely People was used as the sign off song for a Washington, DC TV station for a time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, back when TV stations actually signed off.

I was reminded that back in the early 1970s, the student government at the State University College of New York at New Paltz put on a bunch of concerts, many of which I attended. But I remember reading about one in the Fall of 1971 by some group I had never heard of. The show cost only 50 cents, but I passed.

That group was America, whose A Horse With No Name went to #1 the very next year. In penance, I bought that first album and played it regularly. They’d later have hits such as Ventura Highway, Tin Man, and Lonely People, which I wrote about here.

In 1995, my girlfriend at the time, Carol – now my wife – and I were meeting my old (as in since kindergarten ) friend Karen and this guy from a local (Albany area) radio station named Johnny. As it turned out, Carol and Johnny were acquainted because they’d lived in the same area. After dinner, Karen and the radio guy invited Carol and me to see this musical act which I had never heard of. I might have gone, but Carol was tired so we opted out.

The artist turned out to be Moby, a descendant of Herman Melville, BTW, who had a massively successful album at the end of the decade called Play. What put me in mind about this story was Pantheon Songs’ tribute to a Moby tune that had come out a few years before that dinner, but I had not heard at the time.

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