Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)

Subject: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Dec 18 - 02:10 PM

This is an LP targeting audiences of children (and parents) dating roughly from 1960.
Who else knows of it?
I grew up with it.

The featured artists are Martyn Green and Julie Andrews.
Together they sing nursery rhymes and some familiar children's songs,
and there are a few things that may have been written for the session.

One of the studio musicians is Moondog.
I think the record label might have been EMI/Angel but not certain
(I'm in the US; was it something like Parlophone in the UK?)

Some of the 'numbers' are
the letters of the alphabet
the days of the week 'How many days has my baby to play'
the months of the year 'Thirty days hath September'

'Hot boiled beans and very good butter...'

...shoot, my memory isn't what it was.
I will have to go look the album up.

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Dec 18 - 02:22 PM

Album subtitle is 'Songs of Sense and Nonsense.'

The composer whose music
strings all the little chants and rhymes together
is identified as
Louis Hardin.

It doesn't say who wrote that script, though,
which features Green and Andrews conversing
as though they were small siblings, brother and sister
("...Mother will be calling us soon.")

Let me see if I can make a link to a listing
for the original vinyl,
yes, in the US it is Angel Records.

'Tell It Again'

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: GUEST,Peter Laban
Date: 17 Dec 18 - 02:41 PM

It's included in this Julie Andrews collection, at a give away price:

https://www.ebay.ie/itm/Julie-Andrews-Four-Classic-Albums-Tell-It-Again-My-Fair-Lady-The-Lass-With/381495323400?hash=item58d2e4ab08:g:JXAAAOSwQiFaY6xl:rk:4:pf:0

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Dec 18 - 02:57 PM

According to Mudcat's Obit thread for Moondog (died 1999),
his name is Louis Hardin.
So he gets the composing credits.

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: GUEST,keberoxu
Date: 17 Dec 18 - 08:18 PM

The UK company (in Glasgow?) which re-issued the album on CD,
has put about seven minutes worth of its tracks
on a sound-only YouTube video.

They include:
"Three Wise Men of Gotham went to sea ... "


seven-minute 'songs of fun'

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Dec 18 - 09:47 PM

A possible solution to the question,
who wrote the little script that Andrews and Green speak between musical numbers,
which serves to link the many short compositions/rhymes together.

Have just been using Google searches to see what comes up if I search on this album and its performers.
And the name that comes up is a woman named Julie Laurence.
It seems that Julie Laurence was active in the New York theatre in the 1950's and 1960's, and her specialty was children, and children's literature. Not only did she
write the script,
she wrote the lyrics for the opening rhyme,
the closing rhyme ( a prayer, it seems)
and as for all those nursery rhymes:

Julie Laurence is the one who did the research, collected literally
dozens of children's texts and songs,
and chose which ones were to be
set to music by Louis Hardin a/k/a Moondog.

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Dec 18 - 09:50 PM

Funny how many bits and pieces surface online.
I actually found the program notes from the back of
the LP sleeve for 'Tell It Again.'

Children's Records Blog

The blog entry is April 2015 and in order to find
the "Tell It Again" notes,
one has to scroll slightly partway down the page.

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 18 Dec 18 - 12:40 PM

This one gave me goosebumps! I remember these sounds as a child.

Animal World

Even the words begin to come back.
More rhymes, of course.

"Baby bye, here's a fly / Let us watch him, you and I ..."

"Cuckoo, cuckoo, what do you do ..."

The music of Louis Hardin, a/k/a Moondog, is
decidedly tonal tunes, canons, contrapuntal rounds.
The rhythms are intricate, but the melodies are easy on the ear.

Easy to listen to,
difficult to execute --
something for jazz or classical training.
These little pieces are earworms. They are going to haunt me.

Subject: RE: vintage LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 19 Dec 18 - 01:21 PM

I regret not putting the word "children's" in the thread title.

If I could alter the title myself, I would do so.

My recollections are that this recording, while easy on the ear,
had a funny way of percolating through one's defenses
and tickling your brains.

The counterpoint was so strictly correct, so painstakingly composed,
that one's left brain, with its insistence on order, was pacified.
And one's right brain delighted in the spacey, airy, upbeat pulses
with no bass lines whatever.

I have failed, haven't I, to mention Julius Baker.
The principal flute player for the New York Philharmonic at the time,
he played the flute melodies on this recording
because he, Baker, and 'Moondog' were already friendly.
When asked, after the fact, about the sessions,
Baker volunteered that Andrews and Green, the two
music-hall/Gilbert & Sullivan veterans,
found the time-signatures difficult,
favoring five or seven to the bar as they did.

Of course Baker's flute playing is flawless.

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 02 Jan 19 - 07:09 PM

The early posts on this thread are terribly vague,
probably down to this being a childhood memory thing
and so, stirring up emotion.
Tough on a reader who has no clue what I am speaking of.

So , to sum up.

Somewhere in between Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady
and Disney's transformation of P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins,
young Julie Andrews was offered a job making a studio recording
with Martyn Green, a Gilbert & Sullivan / D'Oyly Carte veteran.
Ms. Andrews had always wanted to work with Mr. Green and she accepted.

The driving force behind the project was a young woman named Julie Laurence,
about whom I can find out almost nothing, but she saw it through.
While the nursery rhymes and lyrics were documented historical things
which Ms Laurence acquired through research,
the music was something else.

The choice was made, not to compile traditional nursery-rhyme music,
but to get a musician to compose original music
for these compiled lyrics.

Enter Moondog, or Louis Hardin Jr.
He scored his music for the two voices of Julie Andrews and Martyn Green,
for his percussion instruments,
and for a single solo flute.
Julius Baker, friends with Moondog, was the flutist.

Julie Laurence wrote two little bits of poetry,
one intended as an introductory song -- "Tell It Again"
and one a child's spoken prayer, as a conclusion.
These are the bookends for all the sung or spoken nursery rhymes in between.

Everything was rehearsed and recorded, it appears, in one long tiring studio session.

I will know more once my book order is delivered --
the official biography of Moondog,
titled something like The Viking of Sixth Avenue.

As I post this, Martyn Green is long deceased;
Moondog died a little more recently;
and Julie Andrews still lives, in her eighties,
but after going under the knife of a voice doctor
who has damaged the larynxes of more than one patient,
she no longer sings publicly.

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: Joe Offer
Date: 03 Jan 19 - 10:37 PM

Here's a YouTube recording of part of the album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JACwrOJb32c

I have to admit I'm disappointed - and I'm a HUGE Julie Andrews fan.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 04 Jan 19 - 05:45 PM

Near the end of that YouTube clip with the "Nonsense Songs/Songs of Fun" grouping,
Martyn Green recites the following tongue-twister.

Betty Botter bought some butter,
But, she said, the butter's bitter;
If I put it in my batter,
It will make my batter bitter
But a bit of better butter
That will make my batter better.

So she bought a bit of butter
Better than her bitter butter,
And she put it in her batter
And the batter was not bitter.
So, 'twas better Betty Botter
Bought a bit of better butter.

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 05 Jan 19 - 05:12 PM

You want Julie Andrews front and center?

Try 3:18, that's three minutes and eighteen seconds into
Bedtime Songs and Lullabies at the very end of this (30-minute) LP.

"Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight ... "

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 05 Jan 19 - 05:31 PM

That previous post track
is the conclusion of the LP, which is only thirty minutes altogether.

This is the opening track,
and I had quite forgotten
that they made Julie Andrews sing such high notes.
This stuff is much harder to perform
than it is to listen to.

Tell It Again: "Favorite Nursery Rhymes"

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 08 Jan 19 - 01:46 PM

The word I wanted is "continuity."
That's some kind of insider talk,
I have seen the word before but never considered what it meant.

On the original sleeve notes for the LP,
Julie Laurence, deeply involved in the production of the recording,
is credited with "continuity."
I guess this would include
the running spoken script which connects all the little songs together.

There is a firm card-stock insert, which just fits inside the LP sleeve,
that presents all the nursery rhyme lyrics but none of
the script / "continuity."

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 15 Jan 19 - 11:55 AM

One of the nursery rhyme songs on "Tell It Again"
has got its own Mudcat thread. I'm terrible at
making links within one Mudcat thread to a different Mudcat thread.
I blow it every time.

The thread is threadid=61122
and it is titled
Lyr Add: Baby Bye, here's a Fly (Theodore Tilton)

"Tell It Again" places this poem/song in its suite/subgroup
"The Animal World", four songs in.
The music, to be redundant, is by Moondog;
Theodore Tilton's poem was collected by Julie Laurence.

Ms. Laurence's source must not have been Tilton's original
since she uses only part of the poem -- the first of its eight stanzas --
and changes the word order;
this is probably because Tilton's little poem was very popular in the
second half of the 1800's, when it was published first,
and excerpts of the poem, with minor variations,
appeared in countless anthologies.
The Mudcat lyric thread gives the original as Tilton wrote it.

"The Animal World," on "Tell It Again," goes like this:

Baby bye,
Here's a fly,
Let us watch him, you and I.
How he crawls
Up the walls,
Yet he never falls.
There he goes
On his toes,
Tickling baby's nose.
If you and I had two such legs,
You and I could walk on eggs.


The words, first published in 1867, must be public domain.
The music, with copyrights,
is part of the estate of Moondog / Louis Hardin Jr.,
administered by Managarm Musik-Verlag in Germany.

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Jan 19 - 07:11 PM

In the same suite of nursery/children's songs,
"The Animal World," comes a setting of this poem.


THE SQUIRREL
by Alexina B. Mease White

Whisky, frisky,
Hippity hop,
Up he goes
To the tree top!

Whirly, twirly,
Round and round,
Down he comes
To the ground.

Furly, curly,
What a tail!
Tall as a feather,
Broad as a sail!

Where's his supper?
In the shell;
Snappy, cracky,
Out it fell!

Stir the fire,
Put on the pot;
Here's his supper
Hissing hot!

-- from Little-folk Songs by Alexina B. White, Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1800, pages 11 - 12.

"Continuity" writer and curator Julie Laurence, for the "Tell it Again" project, found a version of this poem which omits the last stanza about supper cooking in the pot, so this stanza is not heard in Moondog's musical setting. Instead it concludes with the squirrel working on the nutshell: snappy, cracky, out it fell.

Martyn Green sings the nursery rhyme at a brisk tempo.

Subject: RE: Children's LP 'Tell It Again' (UK)
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Jan 19 - 07:41 PM

Also from "The Animal World" is the single quatrain
which Sir Walter Scott introduced in The Antiquary,
one of his Waverly novels. Except -- one variation --
this version dispenses with mention of "dredging."

THE FISH
quoted by Sir Walter Scott

The herring loves the merry moonlight,
The mackerel loves the wind;
But the oyster loves the deep blue sea
For she comes of a gentle kind.

Also assigned to Martyn Green on the "Tell It Again" LP.