Sunday, April 28, 2024
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM, 101.1 FM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell Email me! terrell(at)ksfr.org
Here's my playlist :
OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
O.K., I'll admit this is a pretty dumb idea.
It came to me yesterday after I ran into my friend Dan during my afternoon walk along the Santa Fe River Trail and he mentioned a Ty Segall album called Fudge Sandwich. For some reason that reminded me of Primus' album Pork Soda.
Then it got worse.
So here's. selection of songs from albums named for dishes you've probably never consumed -- and never would want to.
My drink order? How about a frosty can of ...
I see the soup d'jour is Goat Head Soup.
I can' decide between the Burnt Weenie Sandwich ...
I was born in a dump / Mama died and my daddy go drunk...
These are the first words of a song that became one of the most covered tunes of the 1960s, though the covers have gone well beyond. "Tobacco Road" is the story of poverty, sentimentality and a young man's determination to better his circumstances. Or maybe "sentimentality" shouldn't be part of that description, as in the last verse, the singer declares his desire to "blow it up and start all over again."
It sounds like some ancient blues song, something John or Alan Lomax might have picked up from some half-drunk sharecropper or mean-eyed Angola Prison inmate.
But, no, it was written by John D. Loudermilk, a country and pop songwriter from Durham, N.C. He wrote it and was the first to record it 1959 (and released in 1960).
Loudermilk, in a 1988 interview in American Songwriter, spoke of the origins of what probably is his best-known song:
I got the idea for writing that song from a road in our town that was called Tobacco Road because it was where they rolled the hogsheads full of Tobacco down to the river to be loaded onto barges. Along that road were a lot of real tough, seedy-type people, and your folks would have just died if they thought you ever went down there.
He didn't mention that "Tobacco Road" previously had been used as a title of a 1941 movie directed by John Ford, as well as a 1933 Broadway play, both of which were based on a 1932 novel of the same name by Erskine Caldwell.
But that's neither here nor there. The movie, play and novel largely have been forgotten, while the song is a classic. It's been recorded by everyone from Edgar Winter to David Lee Roth; from Hank Williams, Jr. to The Jefferson Airplane ... and lots of folks in between.
Here's that original 1960 version by Loudermilk:
But Loudermilk's version failed to become a hit. It wasn't until the 1964 British Invasion, when a one-hit-wonder band called The Nashville Teens recorded it. And yes, their one hit was indeed wondrous:
Sunday, December 1, 2024 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM, 101.1 FM Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell ...