Music: Pop Records

The most improbably successful tunesmith in the U.S. last week was a genial, buckskin-fringed character out of Timbo, Ark. (pop. 100) named Jimmie Driftwood. Six Driftwood royalty-winners—Soldier’s Joy, Battle of Kookamonga, Tennessee Stud, Sal’s Got a Sugar Lip, The Battle of New Orleans, Sailor Man—were riding the sales charts of pop or country-and-western tunes; in other versions most of them are sung and strummed by Driftwood himself.

Two years ago, Jimmie Driftwood was getting along on $3,200 as principal of the Snowball, Ark. high school. Although he had been singing, composing and collecting folk material all his life (“I sometimes feel like a bunch of musical nerves without any steerage”), he did not try to go commercial until two years ago, when a local music-store owner heard him sing The Battle of New Orleans and sent him to a folk-song-conscious music publisher in Nashville, Tenn. The song took off in half a dozen different records, which stood to earn Jimmie more than $100,000, and abruptly ended his teaching career.

It also started a craze for the pseudohistorical country-and-western ballads that the industry sometimes refers to as “saga songs.” At odd hours of the day or night, 40-year-old Jimmie Driftwood takes up his guitar and plunks them out with the ease of a molting rattler shucking its skin. His most recent inspiration came to him via a radio newscast while he was touring the Ozarks in his air-conditioned Buick one hot day this summer. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, he heard, would soon be a visitor to the U.S. Jimmie began to sing, his wife Cleda got out paper and pencil, and three weeks later RCA Victor was pressing 100,000 copies of The Bear Flew Over the Ocean. Sample lyrics:

Oh, the b’ar flew over the ocean To see what he could see. He saw a friendly nation And all of our people are free. Big b’ar go back and tell them That all of our people are free.

Other new pop records:

Leave It to Jane (Dot LP). Singer Jane Harvey, a girl who can put a promise in a pronoun, swings her way through some convincingly heart-frayed reveries on the loving game—Misty, Everything But You, Lover in the House. In more antic mood, she belts the bromides out of Sent for You Yesterday and Witchcraft.

The Three Bells (The Browns; RCA). One of the nation’s top-selling ballads recounts in lugubrious accents the short, unhappy life of a mountain lad named Little Jimmy Brown (“Just a lonely bell was ringing/In the little village town/ ‘Twas farewell it was ringing/For Little Jimmy Brown”). Hearts and faded flowers.

Sy Oliver Backstage (Dot LP), Singer-Arranger Oliver converses on Whatever Lola Wants, Seventy-Six Trombones, Grant Avenue, with the air of a man rocking a hammock. The familiar exercises have rarely had more infectious grace.

I’m Gonna Get Married (Lloyd Price; ABC-Paramount). The problem here is a lad who “may be too young to get married, but not too young to hide an achin’ heart.” Mother and son fight it out to a rocking draw just short of the altar.

Casey Sings Out (UVania Stereo). Rousing readings of folk classics, including The Gallows Pole and Mules kinner Blues, together with Singer Casey Anderson’s own folk-flavored compositions. New or old, the songs are superbly arranged and resonant with the drama of a first-class voice.

Broken-Hearted Melody (Mercury). Songstress Sarah Vaughan, as chirpy as a sparrow, wonders whatever happened to “the lips I love to kiss.” The warble alone could have driven him away.

For the Very First Time (Glenn Miller and his Orchestra; RCA, 3 LPs). A resurrection of 50 previously unreleased recordings of Miller broadcasts dating from the early ’40s, when the band was in its roaring prime. The selections—I Cried For You, A-Tisket A-Tasket, Sweet and Low—carry a mistily nostalgic air, the big band sound is refulgent, and the phonograph shivers to a boldly swinging beat that has all but disappeared from the modern dance orchestra.

When I’m Thinking of You (Tommy Sands; Capitol LP). In his salad days, Singer Sands honked and rocked his way to sudden fortune with a voice like a jackdaw’s cry. Now at the awkward age—22 —he has renounced rock ‘n’ roll for balladeering on the theory that “I have matured as a person.” His latest album fails to prove that point, but at least it demonstrates that behind the old postnasal drip, a sweetly lyric set of pipes was growing all the time.