"Glorious" Gloria Parker is a veteran of the Big Band era who is not only still alive and well, but plays, among other instruments, musical glasses - wetting one's finger and running it around the rims of a set of wine glasses to play melodies. She's quite amazing, a real virtuoso on her obscure instrument. I esp. dig the cool funk of "God Bless You Merry Gentlemen" from her album "A Toast To Christmas".And that'd be cool enough. But it gets better. Much, much better.
A series of legal mishaps has led the still-feisty New Yorker to write a book entitled "Corruption Reigns in the Courtroom." Not only that, she has released, and is selling thru her website, a musical album of the same name. In a theatrical voice, accompanying herself on piano playing showtune-y music, Parker sings her chirpy, upbeat original songs. All her lyrics deal with how much she hates the American court system. Every song.
Don't have the album yet, but the four mp3s on her site (scroll to bottom of page) range from absolutely wonderful to absolutely wonderful. Haven't read her book, but I know of at least one of the legal setbacks that has caused this obsession - her co-authorship of this song:
Alan Holmes & His New Tones "Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus"
Incredibly, she lost her suit against Disney for it's use of the Sherman Brothers tune featured in "Mary Poppins." I'd be pissed, too. (Actually, Dick Van Dyke's gawd-awful Cockney accent is grounds enough for a legal action.)
She appeared performing on her glasses in the '80s Woody Allen film "Broadway Danny Rose," about a talent agent whose clients are all overlooked hard-luck novelty performers. Guess that makes me the Broadway Danny Rose of music bloggers.
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5 comments:
I want to hear her anti-drug song, "You Can Croak On Crack."
Yeah, supposedly it's a RAP song - please post that one Ms Parker!
Maybe the internet is not so bad after all, since you can find stuff like this!
Greetings. I featured "Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus" in 2005 at my blog (and several times since), and I heard from Ms. Parker, to boot! http://musicyouwont.blogspot.com/2006/03/return-of-supercalafajalistickespeeala.html
It's nice to see a fellow blogger spreading the word about Ms. Parker's song (and Disney's shameless steal of the title).
The link to this song is broken on Lee Hartsfeld's blog, and (as of today, anyway) he advertises that he doesn't have time to fix that sort of thing. "Sorry".
Reading the story there sent me on a quest to hear the song behind the story, where I was happy to find it playable (as of today, anyway) here. It's nice to see that the too-busy-to-fix-broken-links Mr. Hartsfeld still has time to surf the net for opportunities to plug his blug. Yeah, that's MY word for a broken blog, at least until Disney makes it their own.
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