A lot of people have heard Kate and Anna McGarrigle singing Log Driver’s Waltz in the National Film Board’s short cartoon of the Wade Hemsworth song, but mostly they wrote and sang beautiful music of their own. Here, in an in-studio televised performance, the sisters sing a song, written by Kate, about yearning, and leaving and finding home, called Talk To Me Of Mendocino.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

The Chips were a late 50’s doo-wop group from the mean streets of Bed-Stuy, New York. They had only one (minor) hit in their brief career, written by their lead singer when he was in a school for delinquent teens, but it was a particularly catchy one. As my brother wrote, via email:

Though I was never a fan of the doo-wop school of music, this one always gets to me. Starts strong, and then carefully develops it’s theme:

Cow dow hoo-oo
cow cow wanna dib-a-doo
chick’n hon-a-chick-a-chik hole-a-hubba
hell-fried chuck-a-lucka wanna jubba
hi-low ‘n-ay wanna dubba hubba
day down sum wanna jigga-wah
Del rown ay wanna lubba wubba…

Yes, I think we’ve got a strong contender for the theme song of the Ignatieff Summer Tour: here are The Chips charging apace through their 1956 novelty single Rubber Biscuit.
Bounce those Reader Tips into the comments.

Each Monday for the rest of the summer the featured amusement will be a song about a particular city. Songs that merely mention a city, like By The Time I Get To Phoenix, won’t make the cut; the songs will in each case be paeans to the titled city itself. Tonight’s selection is exemplary in that regard, and a good place to start: from 1969, here’s Perry Como making the city of Seattle sound like it’s the greatest place on earth – in other words, like it’s not Seattle.
You are invited to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

In the interest of keeping things light for the summer, tonight’s amusement en route to the tips thread comes from German-born Ria Bartok, who achieved minor success in 60’s France as one of many so-called “yé-yé” girls – yé-yé being a light, la-la-la sort of bubblegum pop. Here she is dancing and lip-syncing her way around Riviera cafes in her remake of French pop star Johnny Hallyday’s hit Because I Saw Linda, called Parce Que J’ai Revu Francois.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

The meaning of any given word may change over time and come to mean something completely different. Gay used to mean “happy,” dykes were things that were constructed to keep water at bay, and bad used to mean, well, “bad,” and not “most excellent.” The word….
Aw, forget it. The preceding quasi-sincere analysis was just a shallow excuse to present, for cheap Saturday night laughs, this decades-old video from an outboard motor manufacturer.
In requires no further comment. Please be civil. The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Tonight’s little Friday night oddity takes us back to a time when things like overpasses and railings were considered delightful, visually interesting expressions of the modern age – or at least, they were viewed that way in communist Poland. From 1969, here’s Polish vocal group the The Novi Singers performing a wordless, unidentified, erm, song.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

The great thing about whining is that unlike, say, playing Rachmaninoff on the piano, or running a mile in four minutes, anyone can do it. Tonight’s musical selection, from light and lovely-voiced British songbirds Lois Wilkinson and Andrea Simpson – The Caravelles – tells us something that too many of us – even those who don’t watch the CBC’s victim-of-the-day stories or read the Toronto Star – already know: You Don’t Have To Be A Baby To Cry.
You are invited to victimize your fellow SDA readers with your tips.

The key to keeping cool in hot weather is to wear light clothing, and, most importantly, to keep your dance moves small and subtle; you’re supposed to feel the heat, not make more of it. If you’re not sure what the proper technique is, simply follow the example of the extra-double lovely Martha Reeves, as she and the Vandellas perform Heatwave.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

The Church of Rome has always had a special place in its musical heart for the voices of pre-pubescent boys, whose pure, pipe-like tones are unlike any other sound. Alas, the window of pre-adolescence lasts only a few years, so starting in the late 1500s bilateral orchiectomies were performed on the particularly fine vocal specimens before they reached puberty. This snicker-snack enabled the castrati to remain in a man-made, perpetual neverland of boy-voicehood, but with the “lung power of a full-grown man.” While the procedure left the singers prone to being “fat, volatile, conceited, and almost impossible to get along with,” it was undertaken, in each instance, in the name of a higher calling:

The impetus for producing the castrato voice in western Europe came from the Church of Rome in the later 16th century. The development of complex polyphonic church music…required voices in the higher register; for this purpose the Papal church choir had used boys and adult male falsettists, mostly imported from Spain, since there was a Papal injunction against women singing in public….There is mention of a castrato in a Roman Church choir as early as 1553, but the first official announcement was in 1589 when Pope Sixtus V issued a Bull providing for the inclusion of four eunuchs in the choir of St Peter’s, Rome. Although the Sistine Chapel was for the private worship of the Pope, and therefore its constitution did not bind the Church as a whole, the practice spread rapidly so that by 1640 castrati were members of all the main choirs of Italy, and they continued to take their place in the Papal chapel for over three centuries….Some theologians opposed the practice, but the Church came to tolerate it on the grounds that the music so produced was for the honour of God…

The practice finally ended when the Papal States were conquered in 1870, but one particular specimen survived long enough to make the sound recording which I am displeased to present tonight. As one wag put it, ‘I’ve just heard the recording…and quite honestly I don’t think it’s worth having your b*lls cut off for that.” Decide for yourself: here’s a 1904 recording of Alessandro Moreschi desperately supplicating his way through Let Us Pray For the Pontiff (“Oremus Pro Pontefice”).
Drop off your Reader Tips in the comments.

In light of the fact that America has its first president who is all but anti-American, and who in his travels around the world all but apologizes for America’s history, it’s time for a little musical rearguard action in anticipation of the resurgence that’s sure to come. Here’s upright, granite-faced American son-of-a-sharecropper Johnny Cash performing his unabashedly patriotic song-poem Ragged Old Flag. Enjoy, you refuge-taking scoundrels.
The comments are open for Reader Tips.

One of the very best ways for people who aren’t very familiar with jazz to begin to get a handle on the pleasures of the music is to listen to a great improviser playfully mining the tonal and rhythmic possibilities of a familiar melody. With that in mind, here’s the great Thelonious Monk exploring and expanding on Vincent Youmans‘ and Irving Caesar’s 1925 composition Tea For Two.
You are invited to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

Just for a bit of of a Saturday night change-up, tonight’s music comes from an alt-rock band called from northern Sweden. There’s not much of a video to speak of, just a shot of the album cover, so I suggest that while listening to the music you look instead at the photo accompanying this report in the Toronto star.
Here are Swedish group The Wannadies performing I Love Myself.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

In 1966 the CBC commissioned Gordon Lightfoot to write a song to help commemorate Canada’s upcoming centennial celebration. First broadcast on January 1, 1967, it’s since become a Canadian classic, and, alongside Stan Rogers’ Northwest Passage, perhaps the greatest Canadian historical song ever written. With lyrics like “they built the mines, the mills and the factories for the good of us all,” though, it’s probably not a song that would pass the CBC’s muster these days, unless he added a verse about raping Gaia.
Accompanied by some nice images and some historical photographs, here is Gordon Lightfoot singing Canadian Railroad Trilogy. (Lyrics here).
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Tonight’s featured song en route to the Reader Tips thread amounts to a heartfelt, sincere plea, one that we all make in our own way at critical points in our lives. Change the odd pronoun reference in the song and it could be made by a misunderstood child, or a spouse, or an employee, or a cop, or a rescuer with an outstretched arm. It’s a beautiful and very human song, any way you slice it. Here’s American Songwriter John Hiatt in a live performance of Have A Little Faith In Me. (h/t commenter batb)
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

In 1908 Robert Stanley Weir’, the son of a Scottish immigrant, composed the lyrics to O Canada. The words we sing today – at hockey games, mostly – are a slightly altered form of one of the three original verses, but tonight we get the full deal: from a 1914 Edison Wax Cyclinder recording, here’s New Brunswick native Harry McClasky (who recorded under the pseudonym Henry Burr – an apt name, considering his bracing, lightly-trilled, Presbyterian Scots delivery) singing the complete and original version of O Canada.
Happy Canada Day, ye stalwart sons and not-so-gentle maidens. You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the Comments.

Tafelmusik – literally “table music” – is a light and airy style of classical music that was originally played at banquets and feasts. It’s also suitable, as it turns out, for post-rioting decompression. In the interests of relieving some of the pain, suffering and post-traumatic stress caused by having an officer raise his voice to you, or look at you the wrong way, or tell you that he doesn’t care what you think, tonight’s selection features a bit of soothing and peaceful tafelmusik written by 18th century Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann. Here are Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antiqua Köln playing the Sonata for oboe and continuo in G minor. Let the healing begin.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Tonight’s amusement en route to the Reader Tips is a video showing that a cop who is doing the right thing – arresting a drunk driver, in this case – may also be abusing her powers in an extrajudicial, although not strictly illegal, manner: here’s the infamous dash-cam recording of Deputy Sergeant Clementine Johnson making a series of increasingly unreasonable and unfair demands on a suspected drunk driver during a field sobriety test.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

I’m going to kick off tonight’s Reader Tips thread with a video of recent speech delivered by the United States’ new top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, honouring the brave men and women who have served in uniform over the years.
Excerpt:

They form an unbroken chain of heroes, who generation after generation have answered the call to serve, a long purple line characterized by courage, commitment and sacrifice. All of them know personally and deeply the terrible grind of constant combat. They persevered through long hard days of fighting, enduring crushing heat and withering cold; they suffered through the loss of their comrades in arms, the brother and sisters alongside whom they fought day after day and night after night, and they experienced what it is to lie in pain in a foxhole, atop a ridge, along a city street, bruised, bleeding, or broken as a result of their service to our country. So to all those who have demonstrated the courage, and made the sacrifice that the purple heart signifies, and to the families who supported them along the way, thank you – thank you – for what you did for our country, as you earned the badge of honour that is sought by none, but is respected by all.

You can see the integrity in the man’s face as he speaks. Here’s US General David Petraeus Honoring Purple Heart Veterans.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

When a pet is in distress and requires your assistance it can sometimes be difficult to pick up the signals. Cats tend to be rather stoic, while tortoises, I’m told, are functionally inscrutable. Dogs are widely considered the easiest animal to read, but in fact the only animal that will always let you know when it is in trouble, and in the clearest possible terms, is a goat, for a goat will not only loudly and repeatedly shout for help, but also – and this is the amazing part – call for you by your name.
I just found that out tonight. In the interests of pre-arming SDA readers with knowledge of what it sounds like when a goat needs your help – maybe it’s being arrested at a G-20 riot, for example – tonight I’m going to feature the sounds of a couple of goats letting their respective owners know that there’s an emergency, and that they must come quickly.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Last week I featured a song about polk salad; tonight, what with it being summer and all, we’re going to take a left turn into a cornfield to feature a strange 1944 song about potato salad – the solid kind, not the runny stuff – as performed by Aggie, Maggie and Elmira Ross. The Ross Sisters‘ act, a unique mix of singing, dancing, contortionism and acrobatics, was once considered good solid family entertainment, but now seems vaguely discomfiting, and desperate, in a stage-mom kind of way. One wag’s description of the performance as “Hee-Haw meets Cirque Du Soleil” is apt; the enterprise doesn’t make any sense, somehow, as the aggressively-smiling, all-American perkiness mixes uneasily with carnival-esque freakishness to create in the viewer something resembling cognitive dissonance.
A true oddity, for your Friday night amusement. Without further ado, here are the Ross Sisters performing Solid Potato Salad.
Back-flip those Reader Tips into the comments.