WACKY WEDNESDAY: Are You Ready, Hezzie?

Before there was Spike Jones, and long before there was the Bonzo Dog Band, there was The Hoosier Hot Shots, a band that bridged Vaudeville and Hollywood. A band in which the lead instruments were a clarinet and a slide whistle.

Behold:



Three of the four Hot Shots played together since the 1920s, playing the Vaudeville circuit as part of Ezra Buzzington's Rube Band. These were clarinet man Gabriel Ward and guitarist Ken Trietsch and his brother Paul "Hezzie" Trietsch, who, with his animated eyebrows, was the real comic of the group. He played the whistle as well as a souped-up washboard and an arsenal of bells. whistles and percussion. Frank Delaney later joined playing stand-up bass.

After the Great Depression killed off Vaudeville, the Hot Shots became national radio stars on the National Barn Dance, on WLS in Chicago and later as regulars on the Uncle Ezra Pinex Cough Syrup show on NBC.

They moved to Hollywood in the late '30s. There, they would appear in 22 films, mostly westerns, and "soundies" such as the above video of From the Indies to the Andes in His Undies.

A personal note about Hezzie Trietsch: When I was a kid and my grandmother was taking me somewhere, she'd often say, "Are you ready, Hezzie?" She'd just laugh when I'd ask who Hezzie was. It wasn't until well into my adulthood, when I discovered The Hoosier Hot Shots that it all became clear to me.

Cub Koda wrote in the All Music Guide:

Although nowhere near as wild as Spike Jones, nor possessing the `thinking man's hillbillies' personas of Homer & Jethro, it is impossible to think of either of those two acts existing -- much less prospering and finding an audience -- without the groundbreaking efforts of the Hoosier Hot Shots.

All true.

Here are a couple of more live songs from these Indiana crazies, "Darlin', You Can't Love But One" and a highly Hoosierized "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" :

Make Your Road The Jukebox Highway

Interstate 10 in south Texas is a seriously boring stretch. But I learned a couple of days ago that it's far more bearable when you turn it into The Jukebox Highway.

To translate, during that part of the drive home from Austin I played some recent episodes of my old friend John Egenes' excellent radio show.

Longtime followers of Santa Fe music know that Egenes was for years an integral part of the local scene. A singer, guitarist and master of mandolin, dobro, banjo, steel guitar and more, he was in more bands than I can count. He moved to New Zealand a few years ago where he's got some academic gig. But he still plays and he's got this cool weekly radio show which is available worldwide via podcast.

Egenes has great taste in country, bluegrass and folk music. In the episodes I heard Sunday he played lots of old favorites like Buck Owens, Guy Clark, Lefty Frizzell, Uncle Tupelo, Dillard & Clark, Rhonda Vincent, etc. and recent favorites like Rachel Brooks. He also played some of his New Mexico cronies like Tom Adler and Wayne Shrubsall and some local New Zealand artists.

But I was most imressed that he played a George Jones that I was not familiar with. That's a wonderful murder ballad called "Open Pit Mine," which deals with a deadly love triangle in an Arizona copper-mining town.

In short, all fans of The Santa Fe Opry should check out The Jukebox Highway.  A bunch of recent episodes are HERE. You can subscribe HERE and you can find the playlists on the show's Facebook page. (Come on, press that LIKE button.)

R.I.P. Kenny "Canuto" Delgado

I just learned that Santa Fe's number one music fan died yesterday on Thanksgiving day. He was 59.
Kenny Delgado, who most people probably know as "Canuto," was a longtime member of the Santa Fe Bandstand Committee, which is responsible for the free music program on the Plaza every summer. But most important, he was a constant presence at concerts. I always looked for him when I went to a show in Santa Fe. He loved music. He'd babble about music joyfully for as long as I knew him. He loved ZZ Top, he loved Concrete Blonde, he loved Santana, he loved Guitar Shorty. He loved a lot of music. And thinking back on it, he rarely talked about music he hated. I don't think Kenny hated much music.

Kenny was Santa Fe rock 'n' roll!

He frequently would call me at KSFR when I was doing a radio show. I always knew it was Canuto because he'd start the conversation exclaiming "Picnic Time!" (an odd musical in-joke we shared.) Then he'd talk about some song I'd just played or some show he'd just seen.

The calls became less frequent in the past three or four years since he became sick. Canuto struggled with cardiac problems during that time. But anytime I saw him, he remained positive. He mostly wanted to yack about some band he'd just seen.

I guess it's appropriate that the last time I actually saw Kenny was at a Santa Fe Bandstand show. Was it The Imperial Rooster? Joe "King" Carrasco? The Handsome Family? All of the above? It doesn't matter. His spirit was always at a Bandstand concert even if he wasn't physically there.
I always looked for Kenny whenever I went to a concert in Santa Fe. I probably will do that for years to come.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Happy Thanksgiving from 1942!

Happy Thanksgiving, music fiends!

This week's Throwback Thursday goes back to 1942, when a funny little musical ensemble called The Schnickelfritz Band appeared in this wacky little clip I found when looking for something else on the old Youtube,

This is what you call your basic "soundie," which was the music video of the 1940s.

I think you'll recognize the tune.

Behold this little gem, produced Sam Coslow and directed by Josef Bern:





So who are these Schnickelfritzers?

According to a column in The Winona Post up in Minnesota by a writer named Frances Edstrom, they were  the house band at a Winona joint called the Sugar Loaf Tavern, "near the intersection of Hwy. 43 and Homer Road in West Burns Valley."

Edstrom writes:


Schnickelfritz was the moniker adopted by Freddie Fisher, a musician originally from Iowa. Freddie and his band, a forerunner of the Spike Jones type of entertainers, combining music with comedy routines, some rather irreverent ...

Schnickelfritz and the band worked with New York agents, had a recording contract with Decca Records, and were billed as "America's Most Unsophisticated Band!" and "Still the Biggest Novelty Recording Attraction."

After some time, Schnickelfritz and his band moved up to St. Paul, where they played at the Midway ...  It was in St. Paul that an agent of singing and movie star Rudy Vallee caught the Schnickelfritz show. He brought Rudy to see the band, and they signed Schnickelfritz to a contract for a movie.

The band appeared in several movies, as well as "soundies."

Fischer left Hollywood in the early '50s and moved to Aspen, Colorado, where, Edstrom said he "ran a novelty shop and played at the popular night club, the Red Onion."

xxxxxx

OK, that was the fun part of this post. Stop reading now if you don't want your Thanksgiving to be free of controversy and poltiics.

As for the song itself, it was a subject of controversy earlier this year when NPR did a story on its website about the minstrel show origins of the tune:

"There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people," writer Theodore R. Johnson wrote.

The story focuses on the use of the song by ice cream trucks. That's because a racist "coon song" in 1916 ("Nigger Loves His Watermelon" by Harry C. Browne, a popular purveyor of racist ditties in his day) refers to watermelon as the "colored man's ice cream."

Nasty stuff indeed.

The New Republic's John McWhorter responded to the NPR piece:

In pop culture of the early twentieth century, that tune is eternally associated with either its inoffensive, nonsensical lyrics or, when performed instrumentally, with farm animals and rural settings. For example, the man who scored Looney Tunes, Carl Stalling, used “Turkey in the Straw” constantly in scenes on farms and especially with chickens and the like. To grow up watching these cartoons was to have the tune hammered into one’s head, especially by Foghorn (“I say, that’s a joke, son!”) Leghorn. 

So, what evidence supports the idea that in the 1920s, when these ice cream trucks became established, publicity executives were actually thinking of anti-“darky” doggerel when deciding what song the trucks would play? 

I'm sure this fight will continue. But I'm pretty sure that The  Schnickelfritz Band wasn't thinking about racist stereotypes when they filmed their version of  the song.

Whatever, may there be no straw in your turkey today.

WACKY WEDNESDAY: Why Did Pop Hate the Beatles?

In 1964, I loved The Beatles. Probably was obsessed with The Beatles and many of the groups that followed in their wake.

But I also loved a singer named Allan Sherman, a singer of novelty songs. Although most commentary about Sherman these days talks about how his parodies reflected American Jewish culture, I'll attest to the universal appeal of his humor. I was an Okie goy boy and I thought he was funny as hell. I even read his autobiography A Gift of Laughter,

When I went to summer camp in the summer of '64, I was loving the new Beatle hits like "A Hard Days Night" and "Can't Buy Me Love," but the first night when I sat down to write a letter to the folks back home, it wasn't Lennon-McCartney lyrics I was quoting. No, I wrote all the lyrics to Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" (substituting "Camp Classen" for "Camp Grenada").

So imagine my pain and confusion later that year when I first heard this song ...



It was like two worlds colliding. How could anyone hate The Beatles? Sherman would fade from my personal pantheon of heroes.

But maybe Sherman wasn't such a stuffy old square. This song was far more bitchen. (UPDATE 2018: The song that was originally posted here has been yanked by the YouTube police. I failed to mention the title and I've long forgotten which bitchen song it was. Probably not  "Seventy-Six Saul Cohens," but what the heck ...)



But if Pop hated The Beatles, what would he have thought of The Misfits, who apparently loved his song "Ratt Fink"?