Saturday, December 31, 2016

Don't Drink and Drive

Howdy, 

Vintage song-poem ads will return next!

I will however, provide a link to something wonderful. Sammy Reed has posted downloadable and playable links to 23 tracks from earlier in this site's history, all of them dating to those posts where my own links were lost, due to the downfall of DivShare. You can visit that post here. Thanks, Sammy! I do hope to repopulate this site at some point, but something else always takes me away from that project


I have never featured the "Promo Records" label before today, and so am correcting that oversight today with a most appropriate ditty. I own perhaps 18 or so of this labels' records, and this is the first one which caught my ear enough to say "you have to share this right away".

Like the Halmark and Noval labels, Promo records did not name their performers, and indicated the budget nature of their work even further by simply typing the song titles and lyricist's names on a generic, un-numbered label. These were also not "records" as are typical shared here, but are more accurately described as Acetates, and one-sided ones at that. (Although I am sharing two songs here, they are not both sides of one record, but two separate records.)

About half of the Promo Records acetates I own were written by Mable Rowlett, and were purchased at the same time, in a bundle. "I Saw a Crash On the Highway" is clearly the outstanding number from the bunch. The phrasing of that title, and the lyrics of some of the verses of the song are all curiously indirect, given that the lyrics make it clear that the narrator of the song caused the crash, which involved fatalities, and that the cause was drinking and driving.

On this New Year's Eve, I hope everyone takes Mabel's lyrics to heart.

Download: No Artist Named: I Saw a Crash on the Highway
Play:

For comparison sake, here is another Mabel Rowlett offering from the Promo Records label, a much more typical number, on a religious theme, titled "On This Mountain".

Download: No Artist Named: On This Mountain
Play:


HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

3 comments:

Sammy Reed said...

Thanks a LOT for the plug there!
I think my next post will be the few 45's I have of songs that used to be on here. I'll put links to the "Wonderful and the Obscure" posts for those songs.

Sammy Reed said...

I just put up the new post!

Graham said...

Is there any known connection between Promo Records and Preview Records those record labels have a lot of similarities