Come on in There, Hambone

(pic via)

Have you been outside?  It's too nice to think, almost too nice to worry.

Cecil Gant was a Nashville-born boogie woogie piano player who banked on ballads.  The "G.I. Sing-Sation" - he was "discovered" playing war bond rallies - had a #1 R&B hit with "I Wonder," cut batches of stuff for bunches of labels between 1944 and his death (which was pneumonia- or STD- or drink-related) in 1951.  Most of the material was original, much of it made up on the spot.

In his Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n' Roll, Nick Tosches quotes the founder of Bullet Records, Jim Bulliet:  "[Gant] drank too much.  He would say, ‘I want to do a session' when he ran out of money.  We would get a bass-player and a guitarist and get him a piano, and I'd go sit in the control room and he'd tinkle around on it, and then he'd say, ‘I'm read,' and tap that bottle; and if we didn't get it the first time, we didn't get it, ‘cause he couldn't remember what he did.  He'd dream up and write a song while he sat there, and he'd give me the title of it.  And the uniqueness of the thing is that all of them sold."

"We're Gonna Rock" (1950) and "Rock Little Baby" (1951) were heavy and hyper, employed the musical and lyrical lexicon of what would get branded and bastardized and re-branded, and re-so-on-and-so-forthed.  But it's too nice out for all jumping around.

Cecil Gant - Hit That Jive Jack (mp3) (buy)

Cecil Gant - I'm a Good Man, But a Poor Man (mp3) (buy)

Cecil Gant - Loose as a Goose (mp3) (buy)

"Hit That Jive Jack" and "Loose as a Goose" bounce right by, the former flying on fills and smiling scat, the latter going from skip to hop and back at whim.  The middle track's my favorite blues ballad of his; Gant's voice is too under-adorned and matter-of-fact to dip into despair.

Take them outside with you.

*

I won't pretend to have deep ties to Letters to Cleo; it's a band I first heard over the closing credits of Melrose Place, for fuck's sake.  It was amusing enough to hear frontwoman Kay Hanley as the voice of Josie in the well-soundtracked but overbearing Josie and the Pussycats movie some years back, and I'd read that she did time making scratch working for videogames and cartoons and such.  She's got a kid and mouths to feed and stuff.

But after hearing two very good songs from Hanley last year - you can download "I Guess I Get It" and watch the video for "Work is for Suckers" at her myspace - it's disheartening to stumble across this interview and find out she's currently a back-up singer for Miley Cyrus.  And that she considers one of the songs she wrote for un film de Care Bears: Oopsy Does It to be "one of the best songs I've written."

Hey!  Here she is lip-synching "Caring Changes the World" at last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade:

I realize I'm not exactly the target demo, here, but that makes me want to kidnap orphans and smother them to death.  Lucky for Hanley and the orphans, it's too nice outside for any of that.

tags: cecil gant  kay hanley  letters to cleo  

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