The news of late brings some interesting obits, especially related to the music world. They’ve reached a level such that today at lunch I want to highlight some of them:
- “You put your right hand in…”: The NY Times has an interesting obit on Robert Degen, who evidently had a hand in writing the Hokey Pokey. What’s interesting is that the article goes into detail into the history of the song. Some credit it to Larry LaPrise, who as part of a musical group, the Ram Trio, is said to have created it in Sun Valley, Idaho, as a novelty number to entertain vacationing skiers. The trio, whose other members were Charles Peter Macak and Tafft Baker, recorded the song, “The Hokey Pokey,” in the late 1940s. Some, however, credit Degen, who copyrighted “The Hokey Pokey Dance” a few years earlier (1944). Then again, there was a similar song, called variously “Hokey Cokey” or “Cokey Cokey,” that was reportedly a favorite of English and American soldiers in England during World War II and is attributed sometimes to a popular British songwriter, Jimmy Kennedy, and sometimes to a London bandleader, Al Tabor. Meanwhile, that Catholic Church thinks the song has disturbing origins and shouldn’t be sung, claiming that the song was written by 18th-century Puritans to mock the language of the Latin Mass. Read the obit. It’s fascinating.
- “…and through the open window she hands Charlie a sandwich…”: He may be the most famous commuter ever: Charlie on the Boston MTA. One of the authors of that song, Bess Lomax Hawes, has a nice obit in the LA Times and one in the NY Times. The latter gives the history of the song, which was written for the Progressive Party’s mayoral candidate, Walter A. O’Brien Jr., in 1949 with Jacqueline Steiner. The song borrowed the tunes from “The Ship That Never Returned” and “Wreck of the Old 97,” and added the lyrics about Charlie. The Kingston Trio, who made the song popular, changed the name to George O’Brien because they didn’t want to promote a leftist candidate. Naturally, the LA Times obit emphasizes the Los Angeles connection, for Lomax was also a prominent anthropologist at what is now Cal State Northridge, which houses the Bess Lomax Hawes Student Folklore Archive, a collection of student research projects that Hawes oversaw.
- “Anybody else can see what’s wrong with me, but they walk away and just pretend”: AP is reporting on the death of Eric Woolfson, a co-founder of the rock group The Alan Parsons Project. I actually have a number of albums from this group (I Robot is a particular favorite), and they had an interesting electronic rock style that I haven’t heard from a lot of other groups. I didn’t know the group had disbanded in the 1990s, but you sometimes never hear when groups fade away. An interesting part of the obit is that he wrote a musical, “Edgar Allan Poe”, currently playing in Berlin.
