April 13 – Turntable Talk 25 : After Coasters, Along Came Ray

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25^th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!

Today we go north to Randy, from Mostly Music Covers. Being from southern Ontario, will his choice be Canadian, eh?

When Dave sent us the topic for this round of Turntable Talk my mind went spinning through names. The Novelty Song was alive and well in the ’50s, ’60s, and into the ’70s. Now, it was hard enough to pick just one song in this category and Dave left us a lot of leeway. I thought of the genius, Victor Borge, and everything up to Weird Al. But for me, few could do a better job than The Coasters and Ray Stevens. With these two names alone, there are dozens of titles to choose from.

Ray Stevens is the man who brought us uplifting songs like “Everything is Beautiful” and “Misty” and won a Grammy Award for each of those. But he liked to make people happy with his goofy songs. He wrote and recorded high-charting novelty songs like “Gitarzan” (#8,1969) and “The Streak” (#1,1974), which capitalized on an international craze of people running around naked at sporting events and elsewhere.

The Coasters would post 13 songs on the R&B Chart and 17 songs on the Hot 100, “Yakety Yak” hit #1 on both in 1958, and “Charlie Brown” in 1959 was #2 on both as well. They did more than just novelty songs “Searchin'”(1957) went to #3 on the Hot 100 and the first of four #1s on the R&B chart.

So where do these two great talents collide?

“Along Came Jones” was a Top 10 hit for The Coasters in 1959. It was written by the legendary team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who had a lot of fun and success with The Coasters.

The premise of the song is someone watching a Western Movie on TV involving the “damsel in distress”, the villain, and the Hero. The name was taken from the movie Along Came Jones, starring one of my one of my favorite actors, Gary Cooper. The movie itself is a comedic take on the Western genre. Novelty all around.

Ray Stevens with a great live clip from the Andy Williams Show. The record was released in 1969 and reached #27 on the Billboard Hot 100.