Sound Collection # 2 WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME

Sound Collection # 3

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME

selected by Some Lonesome Picker

all tracks available on Spotify

Where Everybody Knows Your Name        TV Theme Song Manaicas

You Don´t Mess Around With Jim               Jim Croche

Big Leg Ida                                                       Bill Morrissey

Cody Sang To Me                                           John Stewart

Josie                                                                John Stewart

The Dutchman                                                Steve Goodman

Me & Bobby McGee                                      Gordon Lightfoot

Good Time Charley´s Got The Blues             Danny O´Keefe

The Reverand Mr Black                                 The Kingston Trio

Joe Hill                                                              Paul Robeson

Mrs Brown, You´ve Got A Lovely Daughter    Herman´s Hermits

Son Of A Preacher Man                                    Dusty Springfield

The Joker                                                          The Steve Miller Band

Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress               The Hollies

Brown Eyed Handsome Man                           Nina Simone

Bo Diddley                                                      Teen Kings and Roy Orbison

Who Shot Sam?                                                Wanda Jackson

Rosie Strike Back                                             Roseanne Cash

Annie´s Going to Sing Her Song                     Tom Paxton

The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan                              Marianne Faithful

Set in a fictional and eponymous bar in Boston USA, Cheers was a long running tv comedy series built around the relationships between the various regular customers and staff. The Bar boasted the logo ´a place where everybody knows your name´.

Sounds Collection # 2 is a playlist of 20 songs about people, mostly fictional, about whom we might think everybody knows their name. There are much loved and much-maligned and even some unsavoury characters in their ranks, but of course we start with that iconic theme tune. Listen closely to the lyrics and you will note how they brilliantly convey the nature and the attitude of the venue. So, here we go. Cheers.

Of course, the first time you ever step into a bar that will eventually become your local, you will hear a pin drop when you stare at hard-looking character, and an expectant silence falls, only to be punctured by

You Don´t Mess Around With Jim. I chose this song by the late Jim Croce but could have just as easily selected another of his own songs, about Big Bad Leroy Brown, meaner than a junk yard dog.

Big Leg Ida, created by singer writer Bill Morrissey, (left) is a female equivalent to  Big Bad Leroy Brown,. She is a musician and a party animal and whenever she is booked to play at any bar, regulars know that ´trouble´s coming, with a flat back mandolin !´ Bill Morrissey creates many fabulous characters in his song-writing and if you haven´t heard his music yet the purchase of any one of his many albums will be well rewarded.

John Stewart, of course, has a couple of tracks on this playlist.  Cody is a wonderful song that not only introduces an intriguing character but also re-captures the times Cody would sing about.

Josie was perhaps a catch all-name for the kind of ladies who ´serviced´ soldiers during the great wars. In the course of the lyric it becomes clear that each soldier would somehow fall in love with his own ´Josie´.

The Dutchman was written by Richard Dobson, but the most famous version is the one by the late Steve Goodman who reveals the stoicism of a man who lives in his homeland, ageing and forgetful of vivid memories.

Let us go to the banks of the ocean
where the walls rise above the Zuiderzee.
Long ago, I used to be a young man
And dear Margaret remembers that for me.

My colleague Peter Pearson must be around here somewhere. At least I hope so because he´ll be pleased a Gordon Lightfoot track has been included on Sound Collection # 2. Lightfoot has brought with him,  Me and Bobby Mcgee to illustrate how this Kris Kristofferson song is telling us that in a true friendship two become one.

When I was One And Twenty I was reading Omaha Rainbow, the greatest fanzine ever written. It was owned and edited by Peter O´Brien and boasted great guest writers like John Tobler and Arthur Wood. In Peter´s own playlist, (called Lomax Gold for reasons that escape me now) printed on the back page of each edition, I would see songs by all my favourite writers, Guy Clark, Townes, John Stewart and knew that there were slightly less commercially successful writers that gained entry to these playlists. Even my own group, Lendanear, made two or three entries. I made mental notes to seek out those other slightly obscure names like Danny O´Keefe, but somehow never got around to doing so.

Ah, but now I am two and seventy, with access to search engines, Spotify and with time on my hands. So only this week I have managed to download a copy of Danny O´Keefe´s Good Time Charly´s Got The Blues.

The Kingston Trio introduced us to the intriguing Reverend Mr. Black, a song full of some unexpected aphorisms from a man of the cloth.

I think the next track, Joe Hill, is perhaps the most exciting track on this Sound Collection. Ever since the early seventies I have been in love with the high, clear-voiced Joan Baez listing reported sightings of the union worker and organiser, Joe Hill, but in checking out Joanie´s version for this playlist I found, instead, this, by Paul Robeson in his deep, dark, subterranean voice. Like Baez and the real Joseph Hillstrom, Robeson , too, was an activist and there is a famous bust of him in Touchstones Museum in Rochdale UK, of the singer, with his wrists shackled behind his head, that somehow accentuates the nobility of his face.

Also on this playlist we have a vaudeville performance of Mrs Brown, who has a lovely daughter. This not typical of the usual fare of Peter Noone´s group, although they did also record Henry V111 I am ! You might prefer them, though, as a group that was always Into Something Good.

There are some real characters in this audio version of the Cheers Bar.

There´s a girl over there, for instance who is rumoured to be smitten by The Son Of A Preacher Man and that guy in the corner is Steve Miller, who some call the gangster of love, but most of us just call him The Joker. He can´t take his eyes off that Long, Cool Woman In A Black Dress, but I think every member of The Hollies is chasing her too.

And little Nina Simone over there is always talking about her Brown Eyed Handsome Man,

The Teen Kings and Roy Orbison remind us about Bo Diddley and the beat he never got paid for, and on the subject of heinous crimes Wanda Jackson is wondering Who Shot Sam? whilst Roseanne Cash is urging on (perhaps herself), saying Rosie Strike Back at all those who have mistreated her.

We are very nearly at the end of the night here at Cheers, but there´s somewhat tearful lady heading towards Tom Paxton, who informs us that Annie´s Going To Sing Her Song, Called Take Me Back Again.

That is almost the last song of the evening at Cheer´s, but whether you request it or not you might hear a distant voice offer a plaintiff finale.

It is a song of loneliness, as stated by Zenda magazine. The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan, which illustrates the urban desperation of a woman who is on her way to 40 and ends up going crazy due to the mediocrity of her life. We have chosen the best-known version of this song as the one recorded by the English singer Marianne Faithful in 1979, and which has been used as part of the soundtrack of films such as Thelma And Louise, or episodes of tv series.

The song has been covered at least a dozen times (among others, by Belinda Carlisle), but the original author is Shel Silverstein, a writer, cartoonist and musician from Chicago, famous above all for his illustrated children’s stories and his cartoons for Playboy magazine. The music he composed, always for other performers, ranged from the humorous and parodic to the sad, sometimes within the same composition, and among the artists who sang his lyrics, many were  country musicians,  Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris and the group that first recorded the song we are discussing here.

In 1974, Doctor Hook And The Medicine Show recorded the song. The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan packs into three or four minutes a number of the author’s personal touches: a short, crisp story, a final twist, dark humour (Silverstein served in the Korean War), and a central theme—in this case, everyday desperation, especially as the years go by—that many people can relate to. Lucy lives in a “suburb” (in English it means “well-off residential area,” as opposed to Spanish, where “suburb” often has a negative connotation), and one day she ends up on a roof, from which she is lowered and taken away in a “long white car” (an ambulance), while she continues to dream of driving around Paris in a convertible, even thinking at the end of the story that this dream has come true. In Thelma and Louise, especially with the detail of the car, it serves to describe the mental state of the protagonists, who were only looking to have fun for a weekend, escaping from their disappointing lives, and after an attempted rape and a death they are forced to make radical decisions about their lives.

At the age of thirty-seven
she realised she’d never ride
through (insert location)  in a sports car
with the warm wind in her hair,
so she let the phone keep ringing
and she sat there, softly singing
little nursery rhymes she’d memorised
in her daddy’s easy chair.

Neither Lucy nor her ghost is unique to the Cheers Bar: We have a lot of Lucy Jordans in Lanzarote who are in their eighties now, still looking for ´adventure´ by driving round the mountains with the warm wind in their hair.   

Although, for now, the Cheers Bar stands empty, the ghosts are still whispering !

sound selection # 3 will be previewed in PASS IT ON 68 on Sunday 22^nd September 2024