LATE OCTOBER UPDATE 2020: A PHOTO ESSAY.

 

key to photographs:

1. Joy on Fire poster for our music video, “Uh Huh,” which has been an official selection at the Prisma Rome Independent Film Awards (2020), London Rocks Film Festival (2020), and L.A. Rocks Film Festival (2021). Many other submissions are pending. You can check out the video through this link.

2. I got my flu shot this year!

3. While the image quality isn’t the greatest, this does represent the reunion between me and the fox. By reunion, I mean that we jogged together for the first time since she raised her cubs. As per usual, the fox was more agile.

4. The “Li’l Liza Jane” project goes onward. Once it’s safe, I will go to Emory University in Atlanta, via a Rose Library Fellowship, to research the song in greater depth. We have learned so much about America’s favorite poor gal, including the fact that the tune has been absorbed internationally (and nationally) by a great number of cultures. Pictured above is the song translated into the Chinook language.

5. I voted. Well all right, then.

 

too updated? see “dark valley” by the holidays

“DARK VALLEY” BY THE HOLIDAYS: A NEARLY FORGOTTEN SHAKER FROM 1961 THAT PREDICTED GLOOM AND HOPEFULNESS IN EQUAL MEASURES.

 

A link to the song, if your device is being difficult.

A song speaks to us from nearly 60 years ago, one that acknowledges gloom, to be sure, yet one that traffics amply in propulsion as well. Too many songs don’t possess such crude sophistication; they’ll either veer into tinny, tintype, saccharine testaments, or if not, they’ll sag into the lower registers without any humor whatsoever. We’d otherwise weep into our specialty cocktails (margarita + pineapple?) while the lightshow berates our questionable decision-making. Thankfully, “Dark Valley” nourishes us with its worldly grit. It may inherit some of this momentum from Bo Diddley’s classic freight train racket, but we offer this last observation cautiously.

We know very little about this song. A man named Darrell Tatum probably played lead guitar for the Holidays, a group that appeared most likely as a trio, who recorded “Dark Valley” as an A-side b/w “Desperate” in 1961. Santo Records released the two songs as catalogue No. 500—potentially its first release—in Memphis, Tenn. Songwriting credit goes to Messieurs Alonzo Burris & Bruce Welch. Darrell Tatum and the Holidays joined “the quicksand legions / of history,” to quote the poet Richard Brautigan, and didn’t seem to record again together; Mr. Tatum may have recorded two more songs as a solo act on the Fernwood label about four years later, after which, he may  have become a guitar salesman. This is what we know, which is admittedly very little, except to say that “Dark Valley” deserves an audience.

 

sources of information
45cat entry for Dark Valley
Billboard magazine July 3, 1961
Dead Wax blogpost on Darrell Tatum
Discogs entry for Dark Valley
Hillbilly Country blogpost for Santo Records

too musicky? (sic) see update by photo essay