Ray Stevens: The Five Days of Halloween, Part Five...

Happy Halloween eve...here in my area the kids and younger adults did the trick or treating and running around in costumes this past Thursday evening/night but most of the country waits until either tonight or actual Halloween day (tomorrow) to participate in the trick or treating and scary movie watching, etc. etc. I've been writing this mini blog series for several days and in this installment I'm spotlighting a 1988 performance by Ray Stevens of "The Booger Man". The song comes from his comedy album that year, I Never Made a Record I Didn't Like. I've seen Ray sing this song twice on television but this is my first time seeing this particular performance. The song is about a couple out on a date but it begins with Ray declaring that he isn't afraid of various monsters and characters from famed horror movies...he name drops several well known characters but admits that "The Booger Man" is the one thing that scares him. Terry McMillan is on hand in this 1988 performance on Nashville Now. Terry played the harmonica on the recording and so he's standing near Ray in the appearance. You'll also see Nashville Now musicians Larry Sasser (steel guitar), Jerry Whitehurst (piano), Fred Newell (electric guitar), and the camera may pick up footage of Billy Linneman (bass). I don't know the drummer's name. Larry Sasser, ironically enough, was credited as a Dobro player on Ray's 1988 comedy album...but he's known for playing steel guitar. When Ray was a guest host on Nashville Now in 1991 one of the people Ray interviewed was Larry Sasser and they discussed their experiences together in the music industry. Ralph Emery, the host of Nashville Now, is seen at the beginning of the video.

Ray Stevens and the Halloween Harmonies...

Hello again...in my previous blog entry I spotlighted the upcoming Christmas season of concerts at the Ray Stevens' CabaRay showroom beginning November 1st. However, we don't want to forget about Halloween this coming October 31st. I sometimes post a blog entry each year spotlighting the novelty songs Ray has recorded with a Halloween theme...they're the same songs, of course, because to date he hasn't recorded any new songs with a Halloween theme...but in order to prevent my blog entries surrounding his Halloween songs from being buried in the archives I sometimes resurrect the concept this time each year. Oh I could easily instruct readers of this blog to search the archives on the right hand side of the screen for the month of October in each previous year but that could be a bit time consuming and so I bring back the topic with, hopefully, a different take or angle each time.

On the YouTube front Ray's been issuing audio tracks and performances from his CabaRay Nashville television series of Halloween themed songs from his career. The first of these happened to be a performance from his television series of "Spiders and Snakes". Now, for those very familiar with the song, you'll know that is has nothing to do with Halloween but the title of the song lends itself to creatures you might find slithering and crawling around in any number of deep, dark dungeons and basements. The song was a huge hit for Jim Stafford but Ray recorded a version of the song in 2012 for his 9-CD comical bonanza, The Encyclopedia of Recorded Comedy Music. Ray performed the song on an episode of CabaRay Nashville and here's the performance...



Elsewhere on that 2012 project are Ray's versions of several other novelty songs that have long since been identified with the Halloween season: "The Purple People Eater" (originally recorded by Sheb Wooley in 1958), "The Witch Doctor" (originally recorded as David Seville, alias of Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., in 1958), "Monster Mash" (originally recorded by Bobby 'Boris' Pickett in 1962), and "Haunted House" (originally recorded by Jumpin' Gene Simmons in 1964). A bit more obscure is Ray's take on "Transfusion"...itself not explicitly a song dealing with monsters and ghouls but, in my mind at least, it's title conjures up imagery of mad scientists. That particular novelty song was originally a hit in 1956 by Nervous Norvus, a pseudonym for Jimmy Drake. Ray uploaded an audio track of his 2012 recording of "Haunted House". Ray's version features vocal effects not heard in the original from Jumpin' Gene Simmons as well as the prominent vocal presence of Ray's female harmony singers (a big part of his sound) but keep in mind this is an audio track and not a music video...



Ray unleashed a couple of Halloween-type novelty singles in 1965. One of those happened to be titled "Rockin' Teenage Mummies". The novelty was written by Ray and produced by Shelby Singleton and Jerry Kennedy. Bill Lowery was the publisher and it was issued on Mercury Records. Recently the audio was uploaded onto YouTube and I've embedded it below. You can hear the profound influence The Coasters had on his earlier novelty songs...he does an impeccable vocal impression of Billy Guy, the lead singer of The Coasters, in the 1960 novelty single, "Sgt. Preston of the Yukon"; you'll hear Ray using a Billy Guy vocalization throughout most of that song. The scat-singing from Ray heard in "Rockin' Teenage Mummies" has the gravelly vocal cadence associated with Coasters classics like "Searchin'" and "Poison Ivy".



The second Halloween-type song from Ray Stevens in 1965, also on Mercury Records, and written by Ray...produced by Shelby Singleton and Jerry Kennedy...and published by Bill Lowery...was "Mr. Baker the Undertaker". This novelty was far less jaunty, if that's the proper description, of "Rockin' Teenage Mummies". The mummies, in my opinion, was satirical but you'll have to dig for examples of it underneath the layers of frenetic vocalization and uptempo delivery. The story about Mr. Baker, on the other hand, maintains the same uptempo delivery but Ray is far less frenetic vocally and the lyrics create a scene of an undertaker and his assistant, an Owl named Al, cheerfully awaiting the next mistake from the hospital. You can hear the audio of the song on a site called 45cat which features an embed originating from YouTube. I'm not embedding the clip due to it not being officially uploaded from Ray but I'll share a link to the 45cat website with the embedded audio clip. The site also contains audio of the novelty song's B-side, too. You can visit the site by clicking HERE.

One of the later recordings from Ray, from 1988, tackles the Halloween concept head on...a bluesy novelty titled "The Booger Man". Ray sings about a fictional monster that could put the classic movie monsters to shame...by song's end the focus shifts to Ray and a nameless woman parked near the woods. Ray uses the story of the previously unseen monster to coax the woman into getting a bit more intimate and cozy...suggesting that he hears something out there and she better slide closer...proclaiming the monster's now sitting on top of the car. A couple of years later, in 1990, Ray released "Sittin' Up with the Dead". This song, also adopted as a Halloween novelty, is about an archaic southern custom of keeping the recently departed company until an undertaker/funeral director is able to get to the residence to retrieve the deceased. A very famous music video from Ray was released on the song in 1990 and it's available for viewing on YouTube (it's received more than two million unique views since being uploaded). It was part of Ray's Multi-Platinum 1992 VHS, Comedy Video Classics, as well. I'm going to embed a performance of the song from CabaRay Nashville, however. The reason being is that it's a song that Ray rarely ever performed on television or even in concerts, even though it was made into a very popular music video, but he performed it once on his television series and here it is...

This Ray Stevens LP turns 30...

Hello once more! As the title of this blog entry states...this Ray Stevens LP turns 30. Released in the summer of 1988 on MCA this 10 track comedy album is chock full of top notch material and while the recordings aren't as lengthy as some of the songs on his previous albums it's nevertheless a highly entertaining project. First off the album's title is based upon a phrase associated with Will Rogers. Whereas Will's saying if often quoted as "I never met a man I didn't like", Ray's album offers a twist on that phrase with I Never Made a Record I Didn't Like. As you can see Ray is in full costume as the rope twirling Rogers. I may have shared this story before but I'll repeat it again...I discovered this project at a record store at a shopping mall with my grandfather. At the time of it's purchase it was already several years old. I remember finding the cassette copy among a stack of Ray Stevens cassettes on display at the store. I was there hoping to find his most recent album at that time, Lend Me Your Ears, and I found this one which I had never known about...the same holds true for his 1989 album, Beside Myself. I was still a teenager at the time (pre-16 so I wasn't able to drive on my own) and my only access to stores was with my parent's or my grandparent's...and a lot of the time the local K-Mart and Hart's stores didn't always carry an abundance of Ray Stevens titles...so most of the purchases of Ray Stevens music that I had at that point in time was through my grandparent's who'd take me to a shopping mall not too far away which featured a couple of music stores which carried a wide array of music and plenty of Ray in a comedy music section of the store. Those stores were Camelot and NRM.

Anyway, I found I Never Made a Record I Didn't Like and glanced over the song titles and was dumbfounded that I'd never heard of these songs before...or the album...and I looked at the copyright year, 1988, and a light bulb moment occurred when I realized the album was simply a project my grandfather skipped over when he had purchased several of Ray's albums a couple of years earlier. Ever since the cassette copy came into my possession in the early '90s I've long since been a fan of it. Once I got onto the internet in the mid 2000s I was able to purchase vinyl albums released on Ray Stevens including the vinyl copy of this 1988 release.

First off I'd like to give a run down on the list of musicians that played on this record. I usually don't single out the album musicians but ever since Ray began his CabaRay Nashville television series with a lot more heightened emphasis and attention directed toward his band I figured I'd provide a list of the musicians for this particular release. Ray is credited with playing the synthesizer. The keyboard is credited to Gary Prim. His name appears on several of Ray's albums as keyboard or piano player even though the public at large assumes that Ray plays piano on all of his recordings. Steve Gibson is credited with electric guitar, mandolin, and dobro. Larry Sasser is the credited steel guitar player and it also credits him as a dobro player as well. There's no indication of whether or not Larry and Steve play the dobro together on any of the recordings or if Steve played the dobro on specific recordings while Larry played the dobro on other recordings. I assume the latter. Stuart Keathley is the bass player and the engineer. Stuart had been with Ray for many years as bass player and engineer and would continue as such into the 1990s before his untimely death in a house fire in 1995. Tommy Wells is the drummer. Terry McMillan played the harmonica. Mark Casstevens played the rhythm guitar and the banjo. Lisa Silver was on hand as the fiddle player and as one of the background vocalists along side Sherri Huffman, Wendy Suits, and Diane Vanette. Lisa is another musician that goes back quite awhile with Ray. She's the one singing harmony with Ray during a 1980 appearance on Hee Haw...he's singing the song "Love Me Longer" at the piano wearing a cowboy hat and she's standing to the side of him with fiddle in hand.

As mentioned it's a 10 song comedy album and MCA released two commercial singles. "Surfin' U.S.S.R." was issued as a single and it also became his second music video. The song blends the sounds of Beach Boys music with the real world topicality of the Cold War between The United States and Russia. In the music video there's exclusive content in which Ray does audio impressions of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in addition to delivering opening commentary (off-camera voice over) as an unidentified news man reporting on the meeting between the two world leaders. It's never been stated if Ray was one of the two on camera...I'm assuming Ray had two of his friends act as Reagan and Gorbachev (both are wearing masks) and he delivered their audio remarks. The wives of the two leaders are also on the music video but they don't speak. This footage is exclusive to the music video and that audio isn't heard on the album/single release. It's my guess that it was added to the music video release for visual humor prior to the kick off of the actual song itself. After the completion of the opening track it's time for "The Booger Man", a bluesy comical song dealing with monsters and how if you're not careful the most horrific of them all will get'cha. Ray performed this song on a Halloween themed episode of the televised portion of The Grand Ole Opry in the mid '90s. It's the only time I'd ever seen him perform the song and it's probably the only time he performed the song on television. He wrote it with Buddy Kalb. I don't own a CD copy of this album but I have an image of it saved on my computer so I thought I'd include it in this blog entry. "Mama's in the Sky with Elvis" is a song that originated on a prior project...the 1987 Greatest Hits, Volume Two on MCA...but the label placed it on this 1988 album, too. It's a darkly humorous story about an Elvis fan who passes away in the most bizarre fashion. It's filled with Elvis references from movie titles to song titles and the arrangement carries an Elvis flavor including Ray's impression of The Jordanaires providing harmony/background vocals to open the song.

Something found on most of Ray's comedy albums in the 1980s and early 1990s were traces of topical references or social commentary on trends/fads of the day. Cable television was booming and even though financial reports indicated a decline in satellite television sales the fact remained that some pockets of the country were just discovering the unfiltered programming of satellite television...and what better way to offer comical commentary than with a song whose title utilizes all of the disclaimers accompanying a large amount of programming: "Language, Nudity, Violence, and Sex". In this bouncy sing-a-long with heavy use of fiddle Ray plays the part of a rural well to do who decides to give in to his family's wishes and get satellite television. Ray proceeds to tell us everything he's seen and the things he's noticed his children watching, too...and there's a vague reference to Doctor Ruth even though she's not mentioned by name. This countrified slice of hilarity is followed by a dramatic shift in music in that Ray delivers his version of Michael Jackson's song, "Bad". The song begins with a faithful Rhythm and Blues tinged arrangement prior to it shifting into a full-on rollicking performance with a country overtone with sheep impressions and chicken clucks near the end.

Track Six (the first song on side two if referring to the vinyl or cassette copy) is "The Day I Tried To Teach Charlene MacKenzie How To Drive". This is a bouncy sing-a-long, too, with a 1960's flavor as it tells the story of Ray attempting to teach a childhood girlfriend how to drive. The only roadblock being her deafness. So, Ray tells us his adventure trying to teach her to drive a '57 Chevy and all the chaos that ensues.

Now, following this romping adventure of a song, Ray once again does an about face musically and delivers the amazing "Blood and Suede". In an overall somber arrangement Ray tells the story of a young rock and roll singer in Hollywood whose egotism got the better of him as he crashes his car while listening to his Greatest Hits album turned up full blast in his Porsche. Ray's vocal takes on the part of the wise seen-it-all recalling the Porsche and Mercedes crash near Mulholland Drive. The fault of the crash wasn't necessarily all on the rock music star. The driver of the Mercedes, according to the song, was drunk on Cabernet and speeding but the singer paying too much attention to his music never heard the Mercedes screeching to a halt trying to avoid a collision. It is not a comedy song and it breaks up the overall flow of the album...but it's a great performance.

The next two songs on the album are both uptempo. "Ethelene the Truck Stop Queen" is a song about a waitress at a truck stop and the day to day activity of her job. Ray tells us that she was born in the sleeper of a Peterbilt and her parent's abandoned her by leaving her at a booth at a truck stop wrapped in a road map for protection. In "I Don't Need None of That" Ray tells us of several situations he's found himself in and in each situation he's confirmed his belief that he doesn't need anyone's depressing advice, negativity, or potential trouble (one situation has him on the receiving end of a friend's practical joke involving a prostitute). The album's closing song is the satirical "Old Hippie Class Reunion"...and once more the light is shined on his arranging prowess...because as you listen to the song and hear the music playing along in the background you begin to think you're eavesdropping on a conversation between 2 out of their mind hippies. Ray vocally plays the role of 2 hippies...one with a gravelly voice whose hard of hearing and the other with a lazy, mellow voice who constantly has to remind the other of all of their accomplishments (?) at their latest party. Ray uses that mellow voice as he sings the song, too, and as a result you don't hear his natural voice throughout the entire recording.

Ray Stevens sings...

Halloween always causes me to highlight Ray Stevens recordings that have a Halloween theme of some kind. He's rarely recorded songs about ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and the like but there are a few exceptions sprinkled throughout his career. The earliest happens to be 1963's "Laughing Over My Grave" which takes the concept of the love song to extremes. In it we're told of a couple who've hit bad times...the man's caught cheating and the wife wants to seek revenge on her husband. The man's guilt is reflected in the song's title as he says that's what he can hear her doing. It reaches a climax when the wife approaches him holding a gun...ready to pull the trigger. I have no information about when the song was actually recorded but I'd say 1963...it appeared as a B-side to a single that Mercury Records issued on Ray titled "Bubble Gum the Bubble Dancer". The catalog number is Mercury 72307. The single was officially issued in 1964 even though Ray had ventured to Monument Records in 1963. I believe Mercury still had the contractual rights to release singles on Ray for a few more years...and I believe Monument had to wait until his recording association with Mercury wrapped up and that's why Monument couldn't release any singles on Ray until 1966...at least that's how it appears. I take it that Ray was free to play on sessions for any record label in addition to working with artist's on the Monument label...all the while recording for Mercury Records through 1965.

Anyway...a couple more releases on Mercury also carried a Halloween theme...first off is 1965's "Rockin' Teenage Mummies" about a band of mummies that become rock stars. For bandages they wear band-aids...which create a fury of excitement amongst the band's female fans. Along the way we hear a brief impression of Ed Sullivan...as the band made their way onto his television program. Their singing style, perhaps as a jab at rock bands of the time, features nothing but groans and howls with an added touch of scat singing. It's catalog number is Mercury 72382. That particular single was an A-side...and he followed it up with another Halloween style 1965 novelty, "Mr. Baker the Undertaker". That particular song deals with the happenings at a mortuary where Mr. Baker and his owl assistant, Al, eagerly await each call from the local doctor. Throughout the song we're treated to some undertaker jokes and light-hearted references about death. It reminds of the kind of song that could've been sung by Digger O'Dell from the Life of Riley radio program given all of the morbid, yet funny, one-liners about death. It's catalog number is Mercury 72430.

Much later Ray recorded the bluesy ode to all things Halloween in "The Booger Man". This song was issued in 1988 and can be found on his comedy album I Never Made a Record I Didn't Like. In the song Ray sings about a monster that never got much recognition or fame but it's a real creature preying and spying on people...and much of the reason why the monster slips by without much fanfare is because his victims don't survive the attack. Two years later, 1990, Ray issued "Sittin' Up With the Dead". As of this writing that's the last Halloween-style recording from Ray Stevens. The song deals with an old-time tradition of sitting up with dead people in an effort to make sure the departed isn't robbed or taken advantage of in the hours or days prior to an undertaker arriving and taking the body to the funeral home. The song is funny, of course, and it takes a slight detour from the innocent sitting up with the dead concept and makes a turn toward the surreal. Ray sings about an uncle that's so affected by arthritis that when the uncle died he was stooped over so much that they needed a chain to keep the body laying flat in the casket. However, a thunderstorm erupted and the chain snapped and the Uncle sat up in the casket! This was followed by a loss of electricity, which created more chaos. The song was made into a music video in 1990...and it's available on You Tube. Shifting gears...

This particular single has a catalog number of CBS-7235. Barnaby Records material was at one time distributed by CBS. There were also associations with GRT and the Janus label, too. This particular picture sleeve accompanied the release in France and the more I think about it the more I assume that since "Bridget the Midget" is written in big, bold letters that it's the A-side and "A Mama and a Papa" is the B-side in spite of how the songs are arranged on the picture sleeve. I assume "A Mama and a Papa" was recorded at some point in 1971 around the time he recorded "Turn Your Radio On" and "All My Trials" and when it came time to issue "Bridget the Midget" in France they tacked on "A Mama and a Papa" as the B-side. In case some didn't know, "A Mama and a Papa" reached the Adult-Contemporary charts here in America in 1971...peaking in the Top-5 during the summer. The chart was officially referred to at the time as Easy-Listening. It's B-side is a very rare, obscure recording with the unique title of "Melt". This song, as far as I know, has never appeared on any Ray Stevens compilation and it's only available as a B-side on that 1971 single. The "Melt" song is a love ballad in spite of it's title...it has to do with a romantic and the way he feels whenever the woman in his life gets around him. The very first time I heard the song I instantly loved it.

I know rattling off all of those single releases may sound confusing to some but this may help...

"Bridget the Midget" originally was issued with "Night People" as it's B-side late in 1970. Then along came "A Mama and a Papa" in the summer of 1971 and it was issued with "Melt" as it's B-side. Then, later, "Bridget the Midget" gets released overseas where in this case the B-side is "A Mama and a Papa".