Tuesday, May 15, 2007

"Yeeehhh, the Monkey Speaks His Mind..."

Sometimes when you hear a song, you may not run out and hunt for it but you really hope that you might hear it again. If you're a regular listener of the Swami (Saturdays 10 PM - 1 AM, on 94.9 FM in San Diego, or streaming here) you might have heard The Monkey, by Dave Bartholomew, a semi-spoken song about three monkeys hanging around in a tree and talking, basically saying "no way did those fucked up humans come from us".

If you don't know who Dave Bartholomew is, he's worked with something like half of New Orleans at one time or another. Starting in 1949, he had a hand in records by James "Sugarboy" Crawford, Chris Kenner, Huey "Piano" Smith, Smiley Lewis, Frankie Ford, Shirley and Lee, Roy Brown, Fats, Lloyd Price, you get the idea. He was a busy guy, and a central figure in early New Orleans R & B. The Songwriters Hall of Fame lists 428 titles under his name. Dude was a machine.

Probe Is Turning On the People posted The Monkey a while back, and now, through some sort of hocus-pocus html, the particular post ("session") can now be linked, without scrolling. Probe's cool.

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