Etude Aux Chemins De Fer - Pierre Schaeffer

Pierre Schaeffer is the credited originator of a form of music theory known as Musique concrète. Schaeffer posited a genre of music which uses acousmatic sound as a compositional tool. Put simply, this means using sounds from pretty much anything in the world (not just classically musical sounds such as those from instruments or the human voice) to create a collage of samples manipulated into a musical form.

His first composition in this style, composed in 1948, was Etude Aux Chemins De Fer or Study With Trains- today's Best Song Ever.

As you'd expect with music that rejects music, it's rather hard to describe. My personal listening experience has unfolded in two very distinct ways. When I initially sat down to listen I had put the song on in the background, and all I heard were random train noises. And something that sounded suspiciously like an angry cockatoo.

Then I listened to the song again, this time paying close attention to the rhythm and textures of the sound. You know what? I heard drums thundering along the tracks. I heard musical trills built out of the snapped and clipped whistles. They didn't always flow continuously, but they were most definitely there.

So it's not a perfectly flowing piece of music (how could it ever be?). In many ways it feels like a series of musical snapshots-brief ten seconds glimpses into the melodic rhythms flowing through the world around you, cut together into a two minute blur of the greatest intstrument of them all: Life.

Poisoning Pigeons In The Park - Tom Lehrer

I don't really have much to add about Dr. Demento favourite Tom Lehrer. If you must know, he's a singer-songwriter who wrote and performed an enormous amount of (often darkly) comic music. He's also a polymath and reknowned mathematician. He did That Song that lists the Elements to the tune of Major-General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance.

More to the point, why are you reading instead of playing a song about poisoning pigeons? Stop right now and listen!

Happy Saturday!

Lucinda - Tom Waits

'Well they call me William the Pleaser / I've sold opium, fireworks and lead / Now I'm telling my troubles to strangers / And when the shadows get long I'll be dead'

So Tom Waits opens Lucinda, a booming murder ballad from the album Orphans. The song is the perfect melding of Waits' experimental leanings with his Beat poet via Alan Lomax tinged lyrics.

Nearly the whole backing to the song is the sound of Waits booming, slurring and hollering in a beatbox collage of dust blowing and gallows snapping. Aside from a spare harmonica or the every so often bass note, that's all you get. The song is built from the ground up upon the power of his voice, and shows what a formidable instrument it is in its own right.

By limiting the arrangement to his vocals but chopping them up in a unique style, Waits has created a song which wouldn't seem out of place one hundred years ago or coming out tomorrow. It's a rare feat and powerfully kinetic piece of music.

Insane - The Arkhams

Anything that has a cover featuring Cthulu driving a Cadillac automatically get's an incredible pass. It wouldn't matter if the music was a tower of shit on fire, I would still buy that album and I would still dance my ass off to it.

So it's a good thing then that The Arkhams are also a truly excellent band. Smashing apart the psychobilly genre tag with a standup bass turned jackhammer, the band are like rockabilly and surf and garage rock on steroids and speed. Their 2007 debut album The Road to Arkham is a fast and furious road trip through Hell, Love, and Your Slowly Shattering Mental State. Which brings me to today's Best Song Ever: Insane.

'Insane' is as rip roaring as a rock song gets. The drums sounds like a train derailing over and over again. The guitars shift between chiming spiderweb surf chords, thick arpeggios and crashing shrieks. Lead singer Matt 'The Knife' Goldpaugh whirls between shrieking for his mind and slamming an upright bass like only a future asylum inmate ever could.

It's the sound of Elder Gods, High School Sweethearts and Rock'n'roll racing at 100 miles per hour. Get it. Now.

Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots - The Cheers

Motorcycle gangs were on the rise in the early 1950's. With the founding of the Hells Angels in 1948 (though this date is hotly debated) a new terror was gripping millions of God-Fearing-Nuclear-Families across America. It came riding on asphalt burning wheels while spinning chains and wearing leather jackets, Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots.

Black Denim Trousers was written by Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber, famous for penning an enormous string of hits for artists such as Elvis including Jailhouse Rock, King Creole and Hound Dog. In 1954 the duo had their first American chart success with '(Bazoom) I Need Your Lovin' as performed by The Cheers. They continued this partnership in 1955 with their next hit 'Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots.' It shot to number six and while Stoller and Leiber would go on to futher glory, it proved to be the last Billboard single for The Cheers- but what a way to go out.

Atop snares sputtering like engine backfires and wild horns rollicking you down the highway, singers Bert Convy, Sue Allen and Gil Garfield spin the grim ballad of an anonymous motorcycle rider known as The Terror of Highway 101 who loves his cycle over all else- including his neglected girlfriend Mary-Lou. It's an incredibly theatrical piece of music, complete with stings and motifs recurring over the course of its two minutes and ten seconds. There's also a great economy to the lyrics, managing to pack an enormous amount of both melody and narrative into a breathlessly paced performance.

The song is an example of what came to be known as a Teenage Tragedy song or (as I vastly prefer) a Splatter Platter. These songs all focused on the premature deaths of teenagers, and warned against the hard n' fast life style that was fast becoming a required part of the adolescent experience. This particular number was the first pop song to look at the rise of motorcycle culture and it's seduction of teenagers looking for a thrill. The number would prove to be so popular that it was covered by a wide breadth of artists (including a French version translated for Edith Piaf) and gained the ultimate 50s Seal-of-Success by having a parody song written about it titled Pink Shoe Laces.

So the next time you hop onto your motorcycle (like you usually do) remember the warning of The Cheers, and the twisted wreckage that marks the resting place of The Terror of Highway 101.

Hunting Tigers Out In Indiah - The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were known for their intensely surreal stage shows, bizzare satirical pop songs, and including an explosion in most of their performances. And choirs of robots that blew bubbles. And an invisible strip tease. And singing via living dummies. And that's barely scratching the surface.

The Bonzos were the creation of Vivian Stanshall and Rodney Slater, founded while they studied together at the Central School of Art. The band incoroporated an enormous variety of genres, styles and sounds into their music, eventually leading to the suprise psyche-pop hit Urban Spaceman.

Earlier on however the band had placed an emphasis upon discovering obscure and forgotten British novelty numbers and giving them the Bonzo treatment. It's in this vein that we have today's Best Song Ever: Hunting Tigers Out In Indiah.

Hunting Tigers was originally written by British song writing trio Robert Hargreaves, Stanley J. Damerell and Tolchard Evans, better known for writing hits like If (They Made Me A King) made famous by Perry Como amongst others. The Bonzos would perform the music hall style number on the proto-Pythons television show 'Do Not Adjust Your Set' complete with hunting gear and fake tigers. It's from this show that many of the tracks from their third album Tadpoles were pulled.

In the hands of The Bonzos Hunting Tigers becomes a Ripping Tales comic brought to life, the ink running with colonial pomp and hallucinogens. The bass and guitar lines wind and whip like a charmed snake while glockenspiels jingle their way through the jungle canopy above pianos that slam and twist a bluesy Tiger's rag. And of course leading this crazed Safari are Stanshall and the Bonzo's, giving a clipped, meticulously enunciated sermon on the dangers of tiger hunting. It's catchy, it's mad, and it just may (no, no it won't) save your life should you ever find yourself stranded in India surrounded by Tigers.

Magic Mountain - Lightning Bolt

Everybody hang on, cuz this is going to be relentless.

Lightning Bolt – Magic Mountain

So here's the thing that I love about Magic Mountain:

The intro kicks you into the deep end from twenty feet up and holds you under while the water explodes around you. It's heavy and propulsive. Then just when you think you can't take anymore, the bass guitars kick in- wild eyed and snarling. They push into your ears further and further, crushed and mashed by wild cymbals. You begin to ask yourself- will the band provide a breakdown? Is there a quiet moment to hide in against the chaos? Then they return to the murderous drums of the opening to start the whole thing over again from even higher up and you realize- Oh my God, the intro was the quiet bit.

That experience summarizes listening to Lightning Bolt quit nicely.

Lightning Bolt are a two-piece noise rock band from Rhode Island comprised of Brian Chippendale (Drums/vocals) and Brian Gibson (Bass). They are known for playing in the middle of their audience instead of a stage, using telephone receivers instead of conventional microphones, and spent the first several years of their career touring without ever writing an actual song.

Tipitina - Professor Longhair

If you recently discovered Tipitina off of Hugh Laurie's album, allow me to throw a little grit, sweat and soul in your eyes with the original. We're going to dirty things up to wash away Mr. Laurie's take on the inimitable Professor Longhair:

Professor Longhair – Tipitina

Professor Longhair is one of the fathers of blues piano, introducing a funk and swing to the music via the rhumba rhythms of his native Louisiana that would come to be defined as the New Orleans Piano sound. He spent the early part of his life hustling on the street till he turned to the piano in earnest in the late 1940s and early 50s. Recordings from this period were collected on the 1972 album New Orleans Piano, and it's on this record where we can find not just one but two versions of Tipitina.

The Professor has a marvelous way of making music with intensely infectious energy that manages to sound completely laid back, as if he sat down to jam one day and just happened to play a masterpiece. It's the feeling of your shirt sticking to your back from hours of dancing without you having to move a muscle. It's the melody of laughing with friends even if your friends are a world away. It's the sound of a world buzzing and humming while you catch a nap.

Caledonia - Cromagnon

To break up all the good-time novelty records we've had recently, how about some avant-garde, throat tearing, industrial folk music? Just so you don't start feeling too happy.

Cromagnon were a collective band from New York lead by multi-instrumentalists Brian Elliot and Austin Grasmere. The band put out a single album titled Orgasm (later re-released as Cave Rock in 1993), recorded in just three days. Orgasm is a less a set of songs and more a piece of sound-art. Tracks include ones comprised entirely of screams and rocks being beaten together (Ritual Feast of the Libido), unsettling sound collages of modern technology (Fantasy) and over ten minutes solid of static driven white noise (Toth, Scribe I).

Today's Best Song Ever is opener Caledonia. Somewhere between a Scottish war march and Marylin Manson, the song tears at your eardrums with the whispered screams of madmen and the dead. Warped bagpipes squark and wheeze and drums echo and thunder like boulders tumbling down a mountain.

What's truly incredible about the song is how there were no musical reference points like this sound at the time. No one else was making music like this in 1969, and really no one would again until the late seventies/early eighties blossoming of industrial and black metal.

This creation of an entirely new sound was the foundation of the Cromagnon ethos and the concept behind the album. In a rare interview given in 2009 drummer Sal Sagado described their mission as being one of musical evolution. As he put it, ''The original concept of the album was to progress from different decades of music. Like, in ‘59 Elvis was shaking his pelvis and driving people — well, women — crazy. And adults as well, making them very upset. And then ten years later Hendrix was pouring lighter fluid on his guitar and getting a lot of great distortion out of his Marshall amps. And the Who was breaking up equipment. And then we were trying to carry it on to the next decade. We were going to say, maybe in 1979 there’ll be a group of people on stage that’ll be blowing through reeds of grass while someone is reciting some poetry, and another person is squirting water at a microphone on stage with a hose…'

The members of Cromagnon have since dispersed into solo groups, non-music related work or simply vanished into the ether. Their one album remains a unique and timeless experiment in sound, as fresh and terrifying today as it was when first quietly handed to an unsuspecting public.

The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2 - Goodman & Buchanan

The Flying Saucer Parts 1 & 2 is considered to be an early example of the mash up. The song/radio drama is a parody of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast moving at hyper-speed with the attention span of a music aficionado gnat.

Writers and performers Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman tell the story of the titular flying saucer visiting Earth, and use short clips from various 50s era top 20 hits to help move the story along. For example when intrepid reporter John Cameron-Cameron (Goodman) asks a woman on the street what she would do if the saucer were to land, Little Richard suddenly screams out 'Duck back in the alley!' (taken of course from Long Tall Sally).

Mash ups have come a long way since these rough roots, but some things will never change: the record was immediately slapped down with a copyright infringement case. This lead to reissues of the song having different audio clips spliced in after the forced removal of many of the originals. Despite this the song was widely covered and Goodman and Buchanan would revisit the style and characters several more times (for example with the classic Flying Saucer Goes West) before severing their partnership in 1959.

St. George and the Dragonet - Stan Freberg

Stretching the definition of Best Song Ever to the absolute limit though it does, I couldn't help but share St. George and the Dragonet:

Stan Freberg is an old Hollywood renaissance man, doing everything from animation to voice overs to puppets to advertising. In the early 1950s he began creating satirical songs and skits for Capitol Records, including today's Best Song Ever.

Recorded in late 1953, Freberg (with the help of classic voice actors extraordinaire Daws Butler and June Foray) retells the story of St. George and the Dragon via the lens of the famed police procedural drama Dragnet: '8:05 pm, I was walking out of the castle when a call came in from the chief: A dragon had been devouring maidens. Homicide.'

This isn't a song. I know it's not a song. A lot of the jokes are groan inducing, and there's no doubt that it's well past its expiration date. The reason I love the recording (aside from how ridiculous it is) is that it sat at number one on the charts for four weeks when it debuted.

That would never happen today, and probably shouldn't have happened then- but it did. It's facts like that which make me grin ear to ear. I suppose in some ways recordings like these were the YouTube of their day. The internet is overflowing with short and sweet parodies of television shows and movies, St. George and the Dragonet is- well it seems a little too serious to say it was the great-grandfather of those parodies. Let's just say it was definitely a great something. And if THAT isn't a glowing recommendation, I don't know what is.

The Donut Song - Matt 'Chainsaw' Chaney

Happy month and a half late Donut Day!

An appropriately lazy update for an appropriately lazy song (meant in the absolute best way possible). This charming ukulele number and today's Best Song Ever comes courtesy of Matt 'Chainsaw' Chaney. He wrote the song for the downloadable video game 'Splosion Man created by Twisted Pixel for whom he is also the audio lead (making this timely, the sequel Ms. Splosion Man has just come out).

Chaney's contributions to Twisted Pixel's games are part of the oh-so-Twisted charm that consistently makes them stand out in a gaming landscape of grey guns and brown orchestral stings. You can get this song and some other goodies for free here.

The fact is everyone does love donuts. If you don't you must be a bagel.

Clock on the Wall - Alva Snelling

You'll have to take my word for it, but the man in that video wants to blow your mind. I've looked and looked for any detailed explanation as to the identity of Alva Snelling (also known by his stage name Alva Starr). From the little I could find he appears to hail from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, didn't put out an enormous amount of material, and passed away in 1995.

His one hit (if you can call mainly known by obsessive record collectors a hit) is Clock On the Wall. The song is built on a metronomic ticking that slowly cracks away at your skull like a twitching ball peen hammer tapping an egg. Wire thin guitars begin pricking and burning away at your nerves as Alva spins his own brand of psychedelic surgery.

You've just had your mind blown by a man with an estate agent moustache.

Hocus Pocus - Focus

Hocus Pocus is one of the most ridiculous hits a rock band could hope to have. The song is a largely instrumental number by Dutch prog band Focus. Over the course of it's six and half minutes the song will rock, delight and confuse the hell out of you in appropriately equal measures. It's almost impossible to know where to begin. The song was unleashed on the world in 1971 from the album Focus II. The main refrain of the song is an increasingly ferocious hard rock line complete with wailing million-notes-a-second guitar solos and bass runs. Then just as you're getting comfortable the ethereal yodelling begins to fill your ears, expanding ever outwards like an Alpine balloon before it explodes in a rain of razor sharp guitar strings and grenade drums.
This doesn't even begin to touch on the jazz flutes, the accordions, the knee slapping munchkin gurgles. It's the ultimate 'And that's not all!' song.

Fujiyama Mama - Wanda Jackson

Wanda Jackson was one of the first majorly successful female rockabilly acts. With a unique voice that sounds like sandpaper set on fire, Wanda found consitent success in a myriad of genres and styles but remains most well known for her contributions to rock and roll.


Todays Best Song Ever is the sake fueled swagger of Fujiyama Mama (amusingly one of her first number ones in Japan). Come for the staggering amount of ways the song rhymes Japanese cultural references, stay because you can tell that if you don't Wanda Jackson will beat the hell out of you.

Lil' Liza Jane - The Cackle Sisters

Bird yodeling:

Mary-Jane and Caroline DeZurik, better known as the Cackle Sisters were a close harmony yodel two piece chiefly active in the 1930s and 40s. They shot to fame playing a run of talent shows with their hear-it-once-and-you-won't-forget-it style.

Growing up on a farm for most of the childhood, the Cackle sisters began to mimic the sounds of birds and other animals they heard around them. They developed these calls into a lovably eccentric yodel.


With regular spots on the Purina Mills Checkerboard radio show and guest appearances on programmes like I Love Lucy, the Cackle sisters star burned for but a short while but burned damned brightly. By 1951, after original sister Mary-Jane and her replacement sister Lorraine had already officially retired, the Cackle name was put to rest.

Fortunately you can still enjoy huge swathes of the Cackle legacy by downloading their Checkerboard performances from this site entirely for free.

The Electronic Insides of Dr. Krieg - The Riders of the Mark

The reason I love sixties garage so much is because it was a hotbed of experimental sounds and creativity. It's like a drip feed of one-off bands and projects pumping you full of mutant morphine to give you wonderfully weird hallucinations. Hallucinations like The Electronic Insides of Dr. Krieg:

Much like The Monocles from a few days ago, The Riders of the Mark appeared out of an LSD saturated haze and gave us one song before vanishing again. Armed with little more than a Lord of the Rings referencing name (naturally), Riders John Hill and Don Cochrane entered the studio in 1967 wanting to make a song similar to The Beatles track 'Tomorrow Never Knows.' Only, you know- with a whole lot more angry German machine men bathing in fire (naturally).

The song is a fascinating melding of reference points and genres. The lo-fi fuzz bass and thudding steam-powered drum line feels like a blue print for thrash punk. The backwards looping guitars and organs are firmly entrenched in mid-sixties psychedelia. Electronic squeals and blips slip and slide across the foundation, boring into you like an elastic power-drill. The automaton fever dream screams echo, burst and submerge beneath the waves of sound.

Wonderful. And apparently it's an anti-war song. In so far as songs about degree carrying fire robots can be an anti-war song.

I'm Gonna Haunt You - Fabienne Delsol

Today is Bastille Day and that's about all the tenuous reason I need to recommend Fabienne Delsol.

Fabienne Delsol came over to London from France in the late 1990s and joined the group The Bristols. Today however we are listening to a solo song, I'm Gonna Haunt You.

It's got guitars that wrangle you like spider webs. The bone breaking drum beat rolls back and forth down your spine. Delsol's breathy vocals walk a fine line between sexy and menacing. It feels a bit like a forgotten 60s french surf classic fell through a timewarp and then began seducing everyone in sight.

See? Who says a blog about mainly old and unknown songs can't be totally topical. Happy Bastille Day! (Yes she's based in the UK but she's French so ssshhhhh)

Lift Every Voice and Sing - Shooby 'The Human Horn' Taylor

Wow.

Shooby Taylor, also known as The Human Horn, was a postal worker from the New York area who would frequent small recording studios to lay down his own highly unique brand of scat singing.

He was known to play air sax while getting into his groove. He was never backed by live instruments, he would only sing along to records he brought along with him to the studio (many of which appear to be organ elevator music, but some of which is as grandiose as The Ink Spots).

As ever, the music isn't made in jest. It's simply what Shooby wanted to make. It's unbelievably joyous, breathtakingly energetic, and wildly bizarre.

The best description I've ever heard about Shooby Taylor's music was said by film producer Doug Stone, 'If you know anyone who just went through a breakup and you play Shooby Taylor for them, it makes their problems seem completely ridiculous.'

Season of the Witch (Alternate Version) - Donovan

When Donovan put out his third album Sunshine Superman, the sound was largely a radical departure from what had come before. The finger picked folk ballads were still present, but they rested alongside swirling colourful giants of psychedelia and pop. Amongst these more rocking numbers was the song Season of the Witch. The song meditated on identity, the selling out of beatnik counter culture, paranoia and of course, Witches.

And it's good! That is it's good when you ignore Donovan's ridiculous Jeeves via David Bowie vocal performance. If you're happy living life at a six out of ten, then maybe you should just embrace this version.

But wait! Did you know Donovan recorded an alternate version of the song years later that's only appeared on a single UK-only greatest hits album? And that it's better in just about every way? You didn't? Well let's have a listen.

You can hear the shift from the opening notes. Gone are the semi-acoustic echoes, replaced with snaking whips of icy electric guitar. The drums (especially on those choruses) pound like a sorcery induced heart attack. The new backing vocals scream like a choir of witches. Donovan growls and pounces upon every word like a cat eviscerating an army of mice.

Older and wiser, Donovan brings a new confidence to this performance that destroys the original. Artists rarely re-record songs and make them better. One get's the feeling that Donovan knew the first time round was just the season of the crappy-decorative-Mum-bought-it-at-Asda-for-a-fiver-witch. This time, it would be the real Season of the Witch.

Rock N' Roll McDonalds - Wesley Willis

Wesley Willis was a man possessed, or at the very least haunted, by three demons named Heartbreaker, Nervewrecker and Meansucker. He insisted the only way for him to escape these demons was to make music- and boy has he made a lot of music. 35,000 songs at his last count.

Willis was a Chicago based musician and artist suffering from chronic schizophrenia. In the early 1990s he began releasing large swathes of albums containing his idiosyncratic synth backed punk diatribes. During this period he gained a large cult following (he was known for affectionately head-butting his fans) and would travel in the care of whichever band was opening for him at the time.

The music is often the subject of some controversy. Much like the Kids of Widney High record releases there has been some public backlash as to whether Willis is being exploited by those who enjoy his music or if they genuinely believe in his work. This has lead to Willis fans coining the term 'Savant-Garde' to describe his music.

However you feel about Willis, you can't deny that his songs and his enthusiasm for them are incredibly infectious. Today's song, Rock N' Roll McDonalds, exemplifies his music perfectly. The fact is that Willis really only had two or three songs, but he recycled and tweaked the method to create new pieces at an alarming rate.

They all tend to begin with a basic keyboard back beat with simple synth instruments laid over the top, or 'Devo-lite' as Irwin Chusid described the sound. Willis will then begin to bark often obscene thoughts about whatever the title subject may be (in this instance McDonalds and your ability to rock there, other times it might be giving Batman a beat-down or an ode to his favorite band of the moment). He will often end his songs by shouting out any number of commerical and ad slogans, such as 'Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions.'

The songs are an acquired taste to say the least, and it can be hard to listen to large batches of them; but taken as single pieces they shine in their energy and originality. And now if you're anything like me: you must go to McDonalds- and you must Rock.

Grinnin' in Your Face - Son House

Jack White turned 36 yesterday, and in honor of the occasion we are looking at his favorite song of all time: Grinnin' In Your Face by Son House.

It was this song that sent Jack White down the road of music. It's easy to see how the stripped back nature of the piece has influenced White's own musical experimentation with The White Stripes, especially their hard followed rule of only three instruments per song .

Son House was a Delta blues singer active from the early 1920's to his death in 1988. He trained to be a Baptist preacher till his late teens before being seduced by the blues and killing a man during one of his own performances (allegedly in self defense). He used his religious background by incorporating elements of gospel within the style and framework of the Delta blues.

House had a heavily percussive style of playing and singing, happily accompanying himself on heavily strummed dobro slide guitar or simply clapping along in rhythm. It's the latter style that Grinning in Your Face employs. Raw and electrifying, over eighty years down the line Son House still has the ability to claw his way into your mind with the sheer power of hand claps and his own voice.

The Spider and The Fly - The Monocles

I just...

Okay. It's...

It's hard to explain. Or find any explanation. As far as I can tell, The Monocles were a garage rock band from Colorado who started out making clean cut pop, then they discovered drugs, then this happened.

It walks a very fine line between being insanely kitsch (which it is) and pretty unnerving. The echo drenched bass and drums feel like rubber bands slapping against the underside of your brain. The guitar is less played than punched, crackling with electricity and bark. The organ screams and rolls, building higher and higher before crashing down in on itself.

I don't even know where to begin describing the vocals. A bit like the Justice League narrator and Vincent Price were dropped in a blender. With a mouse. And a B movie actress.

It's not like it would ever be (or ever was) successful, but it doesn't matter. The fun the musicians were having is infectious, and it's definitely unique. It makes me wish we'd see more bizarre stuff like this today. If this doesn't open the door to psychedelic auto-tuned tornadoes of robots demolishing humanity with pop songs, then there is no justice in the world.

Blackbird - Bobby McFerrin

When most people think of Bobby Mcferrin, they think of Don't Worry Be Happy. I'm not knocking that song, but this is the sort of thing Bobby should be remembered for:

Recorded live on a tour of Germany in 1984, the album was the first of it's kind to feature a jazz vocalist completely unaccompanied.

The opening track, his reworking of The Beatles Blackbird, is the perfect showcase for McFerrin's rapid pitch shifts, dropping and rocketing through registers at the speed of light.

Ghost of Stephen Foster - Squirrel Nut Zippers

The brainchild of divorced duo Jimbo Mathus and Katherine Whalen, Squirrel Nut Zippers are a North Carolina based swing revival band, though this description doesn't do any justice to the breadth and uniqueness of their sound (the band tends to aptly self describe as 30's punk).

The song we are looking at today (along with it's gorgeous award winning video) is Ghost of Stephen Foster from the group's fourth album Perennial Favorites. For those not totally up on their American songwriting history, Stephen Foster is considered to be the 'Father of American Music' with a huge range of still widely performed compositions under his belt including Oh! Susanna and Camptown Races.

The song opens with less of a summoning and more of an exorcism of the muse as fiddles moan, drums thunder and radios squeal and warble. Then the Zippers kick the chair out from under you while violently whirling, stamping, growling and gnashing in a can-can of trumpets, ghosts and camptown ladies. It's the equivalent of having a shotgun filled with brass band buckshot placed against your temple while you're feverishly hallucinating and can't help but dance and dance.

Slurf Song - Michael Hurley

In 1976 folk musicians Michael Hurley, The Unholy Modal Rounders, and Jeffery Fredericks & The Clamtones came together to record an album of freewheeling, jovial and at times damned surreal folk and country songs titled Have Moicy! The songs on the album are all cross collaborations between the various bands and personalities, however each tune tends to have an obvious origin point. For example, opener Midnight in Paris is obviously a Modal Rounders number, Robbin' Banks pulsates with Frederick's baritone, and Slurf Song (today's Song of the Day) is Michael Hurley through and through.

The song is built upon a see-sawing dueling fiddles melody with spare stand up bass and drums gently keeping time. In the lyrics, Hurley has taken the structure and style of a drinking song (simple memorable melody, simple repeatable lines) and created the Eating Song. Each verse merrily booms the charms and pitfalls of eating different dishes, from picking out fish bones to how much better tortillas are when you have beans to go with them. The song is made to be belted out while cooking.

If nothing else, the final line is one of the most universally relatable and heartbreaking pieces of song writing ever: 'Oh I see the dishes over there / They fill me with despair.'

Paralyzed - The Legendary Stardust Cowboy

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy (real name Norman Carl Odam) is a sonic force to be reckoned with. He's created a form of rock and roll which boils down the genre to it's bare components. No where can this be seen better than on his debut single Paralyzed.

The Cowboy sings in a style that is all rage, energy, attitude and tongues. He slurs and mangles words till they're barely recognizable, and then howls like a coyote. It's some of the most abrasive and gripping stuff you'll have ever heard.

A chance meeting with T. Bone Burnett (musician and producer of albums such as the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou) lead to the creation of the song. Burnett got behind a drum kit, even going so far as to take a pretty thunderous solo, while the Cowboy begins to manically strut his stuff. He plays a dobro in the same style one might destroy a dobro and skronks on a bugle, all while screaming and spitting before barely uttering the songs refrain, title and effect on the listener: Paralyzed.