What Exactly Does Your Secretary Have To Say About All Of This? Eh? Eh?: “Take A Letter, Maria” by R. B. Greaves

“Sam Cooke lives,” it was said of his nephew at the time. Then again, so did – and, at the time of writing, still does – Tony Orlando. If you must hear the song, try the excellent 1970 cover by Jamaica-to-Toronto singer Wayne McGhie (who passed away last July) and The Sounds Of Joy, who make it sound as though The Band gave it a good, benign going-over:

Date Record Made Number Two: 22 November 1969

Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1

Record At Number One: “Wedding Bell Blues” by The Fifth Dimension

UK Chart Position: None

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Threads Of Alligator Lizards In The Air: “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution

The original idea was for a country-style collaboration with Stevie Nicks, to whom Prince sent a ten-minute instrumental backing track, asking her to come up with some lyrics. However, Nicks was overwhelmed by what she heard and feared that the task was too much for her to take on, so the song was reworked in rehearsal with The Revolution, utilising Wendy Melvoin’s guitar phrasing as a new guideline. The song appears to have existed before the film; Purple Rain the movie is best described as lucid hokum, but its soundtrack changed the atoms which constituted “pop,” far more so than much ostensibly radical music of the period. For many of that decade’s generation, Purple Rain the soundtrack was “our” Ziggy Stardust – better conceived, performed and produced in every way – and the title song, which closes the album, was “our” “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” It is such a patient epic, the song, and about a lot of things, and people – each of the verses addresses a different su

The Tales Of November Come Late: “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot

In many ways, this is a strange and rather old-fashioned song for the mid-seventies, even though the events which it describes were then only a year old. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was for over seventeen years a Great Lakes freighter, transporting pellets of iron ore from mines near Duluth, Minnesota, to iron works in Detroit, Toledo and other Great Lake ports. On the afternoon of 9 November 1975, under the command of its Canadian captain Ernest M McSorley, the ship set sail from Lake Superior, bound for Detroit. But an early storm broke the following day; the ship filled up with water and then capsized – or possibly split – and sank, and although the wreck of the ship was found a few months later, none of the bodies of its twenty-nine-strong crew has ever been found. It sank in Canadian waters. Lightfoot read an article about the disaster in Newsweek , which helped unlock his long-standing writer’s block and inspire the song. He tells the story as simply as possible, though acco

Christian Calm From Canada: “Put Your Hand In The Hand” by Ocean

Following the hushed turbulence of What’s Going On? , it’s perhaps a relief to turn to a straightforward, uplifting religious song, one which you probably sang at school (I certainly did), even though it was never a hit in the UK. Written by Gene MacLellan, who was born in Quebec, grew up in Toronto and eventually moved to Prince Edward Island, “Put Your Hand” was first recorded by the former gym teacher from Nova Scotia, Anne Murray, on her debut album (Murray’s first international hit “Snowbird” was also a MacLellan song). But it was the Toronto-based group Ocean who made the song a hit single. Possibly their most significant member was bassist/singer Jeff Jones, who was a founder member of Rush before making way for Geddy Lee, and who later went on to work with Tom Cochrane in Red Rider. Janice Morgan (later Janice Penfield) sang lead, however, and the band give the song a finely noble reading; there is something about the wearied patience of their performance that puts

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