Music: Pop Records

For folk-music fans, the newest spectator sport is listening to a quartet of leather-lunged Irishmen crowding around a microphone and taking a few melodious cracks at the English. The song, chances are, will be God Bless England:

Oh, Irishmen, forget the past And think of the day that is coming fast, When we shall all be civilized, Neat and clean, and well-advised, Oh, won’t Mother England be surprised, Whack fol the diddle lol the dido day.

The four singers are known as “The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem,” and two of the Clancys come by their revolutionary impulses honestly—they are former members of the I.R.A. Old-style revolution, however, was not nearly so lucrative as recording or touring, and the Clancys have learned that practical lesson from a briskly selling Columbia album, from club dates and concerts that have taken them all over the U.S. In the overcrowded folk field, the Clancys are as fresh and lusty a sound as their fans are likely to hear outside of a County Tipperary pub.

Other pop records:

The Judy Garland Story: The Star Years (M-G-M). For dedicated Garland fans this album is indispensable—a collection of songs from the sound tracks of a half-dozen corny movie musicals that Judy belted to box-office glory in the late 1940s. For fans who have been mourning the lost lithe talent of their youth, it is all here—in such memories as Who? from Till the Clouds Roll By and Better Luck Next Time from Easter Parade.

Always You (Robert Goulet; Columbia). Canadian-trained Baritone Goulet, the singing class of Camelot, soars through a clutch of standards—You’re Breaking My Heart, The Breeze and I—with resonant voice and fine theatrical effect, mercifully avoiding the quavers and innuendoes that pass for emotion in the Johnny Mathis school.

Let’s Twist Her (Bill Black’s Combo; Hi Records). One of the reigning twist bands demonstrates how it’s done in a dozen numbers (Hucklebuck, Royal Twist, Twisteroo) that sound as different from one another as a buzz saw played at different speeds. But bestseller bound.

Inside Sauter-Finegan Revisited (RCA Victor). A Sauter-Finegan orchestra, with its twitters, tweets and weird percussive effects, sounds a little like a tropical jungle greeting the dawn. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Listeners should be warned that Autumn Leaves and April in Paris never sounded this way before—and hopefully never will again.

Sail Away (Original Broadway Cast; Capitol). Noel Coward’s strenuously hedonistic lines sound a little weary here, and his wit is Princeton Tiger ’24 (“If you want to play strip poke /With the girls in cabin B/ Come to me, dear boys, come to me.” But in a couple of songs (Where Shall I Find Him?, Later than Spring) Elaine Stritch whoops it up as if she were really riding a winner.

Martha Schlamme in Concert (M-G-M). In a voice fresh as a sea breeze, Viennese-born Singer Schlamme conducts a folk tour mostly of Europe, avoiding the more familiar stops. Among her wistful best: The Praeties They Are Small, about the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, and that Weill-Brecht triumph of despair, Surabaya Johnny.

Shango Hymn (Geoffrey Holder and his Trinidad Hummingbirds: Washington). Singer-Painter-Dancer Holder and group, to the accompaniment of water glasses and backs of chairs, offer some authentic samples of Caribbean hymns and work songs that may surprise ears accustomed to steel-band calypso. The rhythms are complex, the melodies evocative, the moods haunting and strange.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (The Tokens; RCA Victor). A hit comprehensible only to the darkling adolescent ear. One of the nation’s top singles, evolved partly from a South African chant, it warns in its insistent, dronelike way of a lion lurking near the village—but “Hush, my darling / Don’t fear, my darling / The lion sleeps tonight.” What Variety calls, with more truth than poetry, “a sleeper.”

Small Sad Sam (Phil McLean; Versatile). That persistent folk hero of the pop charts, Big Bad John, is cut down to size (“four-foot-six in his stocking feet”) and given the ride he so richly deserves. His alter ego, it seems, “slid into town one rainy night/ Runnin’ like a dog away from a fight/ He had a pretty big mouth for a guy his size/ And everything he said was a pack of lies . . . Small Sam, chicken Sam.”