Ray Stevens: Singing about Women, Part 1

Hello one and all...all you fans of Ray Stevens!! March is Women's History  Month and I thought it would be neat/fun to take a look back in the long  career of Ray Stevens and single out some of his recordings about women or those that have the names of women in their title. This is going to be a multi-part blog entry and so I'm not going to start off with the obvious ones. Also, as you could guess from the picture sleeve, I'll be going in chronological order from earliest to present day. Now, having said that, it doesn't mean that I'm going to spotlight each and every song dealing with the subject matter. It's just a sampling. In this first installment I'm focusing on three recordings in particular. The first comes from 1964 and was issued as a single only release. The song would eventually find it's way onto an album a few years later. "Bubble Gum the Bubble Dancer" is a novelty song about a bubble dancer. Ray tells us the story of how the dancer, named Bubble Gum, excites the patrons at a club called the Blue Rendezvous. As he's singing about how wild she's driving the men in the audience he adds in some vernacular from the time period such as using the term, cats, to describe the audience. He also gets in the slang expression, hullaballoo, which was such a recurring expression in the early to mid '60s that a television teenager dancer show was created with that title. When you hear the song, and even though it was recorded in the early 1960s and Ray's vocals and the music reflect this, there are moments in the song where you'll detect the phrasing that would come to the forefront in future recordings. When Ray gets to the line where he sings "..and then the music stopped and the house was still..", the way he enunciates the words, stopped and still, are certain to catch your ears. The B-side is a chilling song, "Laughing Over My Grave". Ray sings about a woman who's had enough and she has the man worried about what she's got planned for him. In his worst thoughts he thinks his days are numbered and he can hear her laughing over his grave.

In 1967, by now on the Monument record label, Ray released a single titled "Mary, My Secretary". In this toe-tapper of a song we hear Ray sing about how a secretary that works for him is creeping into his thoughts and is causing his eyes to drift toward her...and while he tries to hold back temptations he ends up once again calling his wife to explain that he's going to be late getting home, again. Ray belts out how his secretary, Mary, is breaking up his happy home. It was a single-only release. The other side of the single happened to be "Answer Me, My Love", a song that deals with a man pleading to his wife that he's never been unfaithful. 

In 1970 Ray signed with the Barnaby Records label. In the final month of the year he released the novelty song "Bridget the Midget the Queen of the Blues". As is the case with most any single that's released within the last 2 or 3 months in a calendar year it reaches it's greatest peak in the first few months of the following year. Early in 1971 "Bridget the Midget the Queen of the Blues" peaked in the Top-50 of the Hot 100...reaching number 50, as a matter of fact. It reached the Top-10 in the United Kingdom...stalling in the runner-up position for several weeks. The song is about a tap dancer working at a Go-Go on Sunset Strip. Ray tells us about Bridget's success as he acts as the narrator and emcee spotlighting Bridget and her backup group, Strawberry and the Short Cakes. During various moments in the song the performance takes a backseat to a rabid fan, possibly drunk, who interjects his enthusiasm into the goings on. The fan hollers "Uh huh I dig it, I really dig it!!" to which Ray, acting as a combination emcee/security guard, hollers back "you can't do that, fella!!". Eventually as Bridget and her group dazzle with more tap dancing the fan hollers out how much he digs it and Ray hollers "watch out, fella, you can't come up on the stage!!!". It's a very funny novelty song written, produced, and arranged by Ray Stevens. It was originally released as a single-only late in 1970 and it wouldn't make it's appearance on a studio album until four years later. It was placed on the 1974 Boogity Boogity album. 

He also made a limited animation music video of the song several decades later and I'm including it in this blog entry, too. I'll be writing part 2 of this blog series soon.

Ray Stevens: Nostalgia Valley, Part 41...

In our 41st stroll through Nostalgia Valley as we spotlight the career of Ray Stevens we re-visit 1971. This was the year that Ray placed three vastly different singles onto several Top-10 charts...but if you're a casual fan or one that is familiar with a lot of the various career bio's floating around on Ray Stevens you wouldn't know about that because 1971 was also the year that came in the shadows of a massive #1 million selling hit single a year earlier in 1970. There's never been too much exploration into what was happening in Ray's career in 1971 because a lot of the more professional authors, writers, critics, etc. like to skip around too much when they offer information. Typically what we get is a commentary that highlights specific years...for example: a writer might mention Ray's 1970 #1 hit but then jump ahead 4 years to 1974 and pick up the commentary from there. If a reader of the commentary, or the essay, happens to be a fan of Ray Stevens or happens to be someone that's interested in Ray's music and in time becomes a devoted fan, I feel the reader is being cheated out of 4 years of information and music due to those omissions. I know that when I'd read essays and liner notes in a variety of albums and CD's issued on Ray through the years there always seemed to be a pattern to the information and that pattern was to simply highlight only "the big songs" and pretty much ignore the rest. Now this isn't the case all the time. There are some liner notes and some bio's on Ray that go beyond hitting the obvious but those are few and far between unfortunately. I've written about liner notes before and so search the archive section off to the right for more expansive commentary on the subject.

You may be asking: okay, what exactly are those three vastly differently Top-10 hits from Ray Stevens in 1971??

The first Top-10 of 1971 for Ray Stevens happened to be a single that was issued in December 1970 but had it's successful chart run in the early months of 1971. "Bridget the Midget", the mysterious hit single from Ray Stevens, reached the Top-50 on the pop chart in America and the Top-5 in the United Kingdom. I call it the mysterious single because a lot of people who hear of the song don't really believe such a song exists until they find it. The single, which features sped up vocals in the tradition of the Chipmunks, is a brilliant send-up of Go-Go dance clubs. Ray plays the part of the singer/narrator/announcer as well as a customer who seems under the influence and clearly infatuated with the star attraction, Bridget, whose also voiced by Ray. It's a comic vignette in song. The single never appeared on any album until the label, Barnaby, issued a Greatest Hits collection on Ray. The song, ironically, would be a featured track on just about every greatest hits-type collection issued on Ray through the 1970's but then it's availability on compilation releases started to diminish by the mid 1980's and in my mind a shroud of mystery began to form around it. It returned to a compilation project in 1990 on the release of His All-Time Greatest Comic Hits, which is where I first heard the song. That 1990 project from Curb Records was later certified a Gold album for sales exceeding 500,000 copies.

The other two Top-10 hits for Ray in 1971 were what became the first two releases from a soon to be released gospel project, Turn Your Radio On. "A Mama and a Papa" became a major Top-5 Easy-Listening hit in America as well as in Canada. It's a story about the importance of having a mother figure and a father figure in any child's life. Gospel music rarely has any kind of support from what's called mainstream radio and it's chart performance on America's Hot 100 and Canada's pop chart is reflective of this. Nevertheless, the single became a hit anyway. The other Top-10 hit for Ray in 1971 was the total opposite of "A Mama and a Papa" in both mood and delivery. "A Mama and a Papa" has a subdued vocalization while "All My Trials" showcases a glorious, triumphant vocalization with wonderful use of multi-tracking and overdubbed harmonies. It, too, became a Top-5 hit on the Easy-Listening chart. There are two versions of this recording. The shorter version omits a lot of the instrumental breaks as well as some of the lyrics found on the longer version. The reason for this was simple: to shorten the song for radio airplay. The longer version, which runs 4 minutes and 33 seconds, can be found on a 1996 compilation from Curb Records, Great Gospel Songs. The shorter version clocks in at just over 3 minutes, a far cry from 4 minutes, 33 seconds. The shorter version is what appears on most compilations but sometimes the longer version is chosen instead.