Shirley, Shirley, Shirley! Plus a You-Know-Who Secret Song!

Feather! Sparkles! Glitter! Yes, it's that Damn Shirley Bassey. Is there any singer working today who's as flat-out wowza as Shirley? Of course not. I was first introduced to her sight unseen. That is, as a child, I saw "Goldfinger" on TV. During the opening credits, I was gobsmacked, as the Brits say, when her voice exploded like a supernova from the speakers. What's happening?! I wondered. Had someone ignited a wee atom bomb? Did lightning just strike? Did I need to duck and cover?

A Deluge Of Divas, Hess' Devil, Dreamy Music And - Hot-cha! - Here Comes Liza, Plus A Jinx-You're-It Secret Song!

Sometimes too much is just too delicious, like the name Anna Maria Alberghetti. Ahhhhh. Doesn't it just slip off your tongue? An actress and an operatic singer, Anna, pictured above, is one of many divas crowding this delightful collection, a Cheerfully Delectable Exclusive! just for you.

Holiday Cheer With Babs And Friends, Giggles With Lily, Basil Does Poe, Brassy Bassey, Magnificent Monk, Plus A Mars Attack Secret Song!

Wow! I'll have what she's having - but make it a double. Babs sure knows how to get into the holiday spirit, and in the late 1960's, she contributed several songs to two promotional Christmas compilation LPs, the first put out by Maxwell House, the second by Good Year Tires. And they're here today, both of them super-exclusive to the Cheerful! Aren't you glad you stopped by?

If you really-really love your Barbra, then you must give a listen to "Seasons Greetings" above. The first part is an all-Babs "Christmas Concert" in which she sings "Ava Maria," "Silent Night," and more, in a slow, reverent tone that's more in keeping with her "Classical Barbra" than her pop albums of the day. Oh, and there's also Doris Day on the flip side, as well as Jim Nabors singing "Jingle Bells" in a low-low basso profondo voice which sounds...I'm not quite sure. Ridiculous? Delightful? You decide.

The second LP offers more variety in terms of singers - and a bit of overlap with a few of Barbra's and Doris' songs reappearing from the first LP. But how can you resist Ella Fitzgerald doing "White Christmas?" Or more holiday songs from Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra and Julie Andrews? There's also a contribution from Pat Boone, though I'll say no more about that (except to say that it's almost painfully, soul-killingly bland) (but really, I have no fixed opinion on the matter).

Do you know the giggly ladies above? They're the Lennon Sisters, a sort of second-rung Andrew Sisters group who nevertheless distinguished themselves with their toothsome high spirits. They were discovered one day at their school by Lawrence Welk's son (no, really), then whisked onto "The Lawrence Welk Show" on Christmas Eve in 1955. From that point on, they were dubbed "America's Sweethearts."

Their Christmas LP finds them putting their own bubbly spin on "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Jingle Bells" (of course), "Joy To The World," and scads more. Fair warning, the first two cuts are a bit scritchy-scratchy, but honest, it's the best LP copy out there I could find. So live with a few scratches, and enjoy! The Lennon Sisters certainly are.

Now let's kick it up a notch. Or two or five or twenty. You can't listen to holiday tunes all month, can you? And don't you want something to take you into the New Year? Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the one, the only...

...Miss Shirley Bassey. There is no other. And you really must hear her song "Johnny One-Note." You know the drill. If Shirley is only going to get one note, then she's. Going. To. Kill. It. She's slays in all the other songs, too, on her 1966 LP "I've Got A Song For You," a Cheerful Exclusive! 

From one number to the next, Bassey nearly gives you whiplash on numbers like "All Or Nothing At All" (my favorite, because the insane arrangement seems to match her vocals) and "Let Me Sing And I'm Happy," which is as close to an autobiographical song as you're going to get from her, and wow, does she live. Every Single. Damn. Note.

I don't know about you, but with family, friends and all sorts of what-ev-uh over the holidays, I need some yucks. Happily, my Cuban Luvuh allowed me to digitize his prized Lily Tomlin LP. Her first one. And the only one that earned a Grammy.

Get ready. Everyone's favorite Tomlin character is here - in this supah Cheerful Exclusive! - none other than Miss Ernestine, the supremely pushy phone operator who delightedly squabbles with the likes of Joan Crawford and J. Edgar Hoover, while also contending with obscene callers, the mafia and the Pope. And that's just for starters.

Equally fun is the one-and-only Thelonius Monk. Yes, I said fun. Too often our music greats are lionized and praised and eulogized to the point that you forget what made them great to begin with, or in Monk's case, you lose sight of the sheer joy you feel when you hear him perform.

I love the picture of Monk above with British Baroness Panonicca "Nica" Rothschild de Koenigswarter, or "The Jazz Baroness," a devoted patron to Charlie Parker and Monk, both of whom she cared for during their last dying days in her apartment. Her gaze is pure adoration.

Want to know what Nica was all crazy about? Give a listen to his 1964 LP "Monk," yet another Cheerful Exclusive! (in lossless). The track "Panonnica" is a wonderful tribute to you-know-who in an LP evenly mixed between covers and originals. In other words, it's pure jazz pleasure. And fun! There, I said it.

Finally, after the New Year has passed, in the chill of night, you just might need to add an extra spine-tingling shudder with a certain Baltimore scribe:

Yes, you need Poe. In this mwah-haha Cheerful Exclusive!, listen with eyes wide open as the peerless Basil Rathbone reads all of your Poe favorites like "The Raven," "The Fall Of The House Of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and oodles and kaboodles more. I'm pretty sure Rathbone was created for this job.

This will be my last post until after the New Year, so Merry Jingle Thingies and Happy New Year's to you all. What a tumultuous year. The Cheerful Earfull went from having hundreds of posts, and then - poof! - they were all vanquished by dastardly foes (every link was gone in a flash). But now it's coming back as a respectable (ish) blog one post at a time. And all along you've been cheering me on, dear reader. Don't think I'm not grateful.

Less grateful is The Secret Song File, who was told by her pimp to go mass-market and clean up her act. In other words, no more dyed platinum hair. Sad emoticon. The same thing might have happened to a certain Honolulu-born recording artist, even though his mobsterish (*cough*) first CD sold well. In his latest CD here today, there seems to be an effort to really go commercial and really make it big. I'm not saying it's a money grab, it's not, but it's...hmm, I don't know. You tell me.

I do know one thing. If you think The Secret Song File is giving up platinum hair or going mass-market or even cavorting within sniffing distance of respectability in the New Year, relax, kemosabe. Nevah. Gonna. Happen.

Joy to the world, be happy, drink like a fish, give big sloppy kisses to lots of people!

And leave a comment if you like. Or whisper. I'll hear. 

Shirley's Best, Hattie Gets Ticklish, Plus Peggy Experiments And An After 'W' Secret Song!

Can you believe Shirley Bassey is 75? Yeah, I can't, either. She certainly doesn't sound her age; that clarion-call voice is as powerful as ever. She's one of the world's most beloved singers - yet incredibly, she's largely ignored in the U.S. What the hell is wrong with us? How can you not love a singer who was born above a brothel in a Wales slum, then went on to achieve international fame by singing (and loudly), "Go-o-o-old....finger!" When I first heard her trumpet that refrain, I thought my head would burst open. And she only got better from there.

Shirley's had many compilation CDs before, but this 2-CD set is especially yummy, running the gamut from her earliest hits to "History Repeating" and much more (including some of my favorites, like "Moonraker" and "The Liquidator"). Subtlety be damned! Shirley likes it big and loud and full of brass. Can you blame her?

For all you comedy lovers out there, do I have a treat for you today. Hattie Noel, as you might know, was a Hollywood actress in the 1930's and 40's - she almost nabbed Hattie McDaniel's role in "Gone With The Wind" - but she was also a singer who performed with the likes of Count Basie and Louis Armstrong.

If that weren't enough, she was also a stand-up comedian. Can you believe? Yes, there really were female comics before Phyllis Diller. It was Eddie Cantor who saw this special side of her. She was a regular on his radio show, and luckily, he brought her to Hollywood where she knocked 'em dead in stage musicals and comedy nights.

Given her gift for comedy, and particularly physical comedy, it's not surprising that she also worked as a movement model for animators; after filming her, the animators would trace, or rotoscope, her frame-by-frame movements so that the cartoon character's movements would appear more "realistic."

Along with many similar gigs, Hattie was the movement model for "Hyacinth Hippo" in Disney's "Fantasia" - a fact which Disney kept hidden for decades. And not, presumably, since it might appear racist, but because animators are loath to admit that a cartoon character's physical schtick came from someone else, especially in a sequence as famous as this one (but then they've also scrubbed the picaninny centaurs out of "Fantasia," too, so who knows what their mind-set is). At any rate, if you haven't seen "Fantasia," Hattie's sequence is a masterpiece of physical comedy, and now we know who to thank.

Her LP "The Tickled Soul Of Hattie Noel" is fascinating historically, but more important, it's just plain funny. And for those who think they didn't talk "that way" back then, you might want to scoot the crumbcatchers out of the room before you play this. Hattie is blissfully obscene in routines like "Licking Dicks," "The Frantic Hole," "Beauty Vs. Bootie" and "A Chinese Disease," to name just a few.

When my Cuban Luvuh was strutting (he does that naturally) (he is Cuban, after all) through our local record store, he found Peggy Lee's "Mirrors" and asked me if we had it. I had to think for a moment, because it seems like we have every single Peggy Lee ever released. But not this one.

Released in 1975, and a Cheerful Exclusive, "Mirrors" is Lee's experimental collection of non-narrative, "neo-cabaret art songs," written by "Jailhouse Rock" songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It's trippy, it's beautiful, even haunting at times, and unlike many concept albums of the period, each song builds on all the preceding songs - in terms of the music and the mood, not in a narrative sense (which is much easier).

As you might have guessed, this was all way ahead of its time (it was later re-packaged to include her hit "Is That All There Is?", but the LP still didn't sell). Is this Peggy Lee's masterpiece? I won't go out on that limb (yet), but it's certainly an unheralded "great LP."

The Secret Song File is all business today. Miss Bossy Pants. Miss Sassy Stilettos. Miss Galaxy Girl Guide. All it takes is a pose, as you can see below. What does that have to do with today's offering? Nothing.

Or maybe it does. Because today's young turks (*wink*) and captains of industry might cotton to this delightful, upcoming Brit-pop CD inspired, says the group, by a party scene which they were just too young to enjoy (I so-o-o-o have that problem. All. The. Time.). So now they're kind of, um, co-mingling with it (*wink*wink*). Anyway, "xoxo," as they say, only leave the "o's" out.

Always kiss both cheeks. It's klassier that way.

And, hey, the comment section is just itching for your gossip, hearsay and lingua franca!