Thursday, January 01, 2009

Announcing! Song Poem of the Week Project

Happy New Year! In the spirit of starting new things, I'm going to do something here, and I'm hoping I can hold myself to this....

Someone commenting on my recent post to the WFMU blog asked if there were any song-poem sites which are currently active, since the AS/PMA site has been present, but without updates, for several years now. 

In answer to this, and hopefully for the interest of many others, I'm going to try and post at least one song-poem, from my rather large stash of same, per week. 

To start, a record from one of the most obscure of labels, Iris. This label, from the Lee Hudson production machine, was named after songwriter Iris Tipton, who wrote the words for all of the records released on the label, including the extremely memorable "I Spent My Last Three Dollars On an Irish Sweepstakes Ticket", sung by Cara Stewart. 

Cara's unique vocals will be the first thing you hear here, as well, but the lead singer for this tune is Jeff Reynolds, who I'm sure you'll agree does a stellar job on this patriotic number, "In God We Trust". 

I love everything about this one - the snare drums, the back and forth between the Cara backing vocals and the manly men on loan from "The Ballad of the Green Berets", and the rather simplified, glossed over view of both the American War of Independence and the religious views of its leaders, all in less than 90 seconds. 

Stirring. 

Play:

4 comments:

ajm said...

That was me on the WFMU site who asked about songpoem blogs. Thank you for taking up the cause!

BenT said...

How can you resist calling it "Song-Poem of the WEAK"?

Sammy Reed said...

This song isn't working now.

Sammy Reed said...

Thank you VERY MUCH, Bob, for getting all these broken links fixed!