Music Advent J-L, with bonus elevator music

[mellicious]

First, a dose of old-school holidays, if you haven't seen this one already:

It's supposedly actual K-Mart in-store music from 1974. (I say "supposedly" but I can't imagine why anybody would fake such a thing, and it certainly sounds right. I don't remember that particular K-Mart jingle but that doesn't mean it's not real.) I've been listening to this off & on in about 5-minute chunks because that's about all I can stand at one time. It's nostalgic and horrible, all at once.

Okay, so for Music Advent, we are at J, and for that I wanted Jolie Blon' - although I actually ended up using a version called "Sweet Jole Blon'" so I cheated a little. It may be a standard, but not even the spelling is standardized.

I don't know how generally famous Doug Kershaw is (the link is to Wikipedia, and I suspect the answer is "not very"), but I have a longstanding interest in cajun & zydeco music so I've known who he was for years. He's such a genuine Cajun he didn't even grow up speaking English. (He's 79 now; I doubt that that's very common today.) He's from Cameron Parish, which is the far southwest corner of Louisiana, right across the Sabine River from Texas. That's major swampland.

For K, I had a couple of possibilities (in fact I may do an entry later about the things I didn't pick) but I had - for some reason - Steve Martin's "King Tut" in my iTunes collection, and I eventually went with that. I'm just going to link to the original version, because it wouldn't display in Twitter and I bet it doesn't display here - that's on NBC's website. It's from season 3 of SNL, which is when I was in college so I probably saw it when it first aired, live. We used to always watch SNL unless we were out somewhere, I know. From YouTube, though, here's a live version that's only slightly later. (Although it lacks Martin's funkier costume of the SNL version, not to mention the dancers and the SNL band in full regalia.) (As I recall, Martin did a comedy tour in his heyday where he wore the white suit through the whole thing, so that's probably where this came from.)

(I was initially confused about why he suddenly says "Henry Winkler!" in the middle because I wasn't paying attention to the guy holding the piece of scenery, but he is indeed back there.)

For L, I did Genesis' "Land of Confusion" - which is a song I've always liked, but I mostly picked it because it has an entertaining (if somewhat creepy) video full of puppets:

(And I just posted my M video but I'll get to that next time.)

Comments

MusicAdvent!

[(Anonymous)]

I committed to doing only songs that were covered on or extensively featured the cello this year, so that has limited my choices somewhat, but I think choosing King Tut for K was inspired. I'm younger than you are - Season 3 of SNL was one of the seasons I watched from a hiding place behind the living room sofa (I was eight, that year, I think.) but that song remains an indelible imprint on my childhood.

Happy Holidailies.

-- MissMeliss / @melysse on Twitter.

RE: MusicAdvent!

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

It was definitely one of the high points of early Saturday Night Live, and that's a very high bar.