Re: question from Tom Digby
- From: quester@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Harold Groot)
- Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2005 03:02:18 GMT
On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:22:36 -0700, Lee Gold <lee.gold@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>Tom Digby (who's going to be Toastmaster & Spoken Word
>GoH at ConChord in 2007) writes in his current
>ezine:
>
>
>> Recently I went to a concert of Heather Alexander's folk-rock band
>> Uffington Horse. See
>>
>> http://www.heatherlands.com/
>>
>> Toward the end of the evening she broke two guitar strings in fairly
>> quick succession.
>>
>> When the second one broke I realized that the phrase "String Replacing
>> Time" could be made to scan to an old pop song called "Finger Poppin'
>> Time". But none of the people I told about it afterward, including
>> Heather and her band members, had ever heard of the song.
>>
>> A Google search on the title as a phrase gets a couple of sites listing
>> the song's date as 1960. Even if most of the people at the concert were
>> born after that, shouldn't at least some of them have heard of it? Was
>> it less of a hit than I recall, or did it just somehow miss getting onto
>> the oldies stations' playlists, or what?
>>
>> So anyway, does anyone (preferably a guitar player) want to do anything
>> with
>>
>> It's string re -- placing time.
>> Guitar strin-n-ng replacing time
>> ...
Well, it quite possibly was as big a hit as Tom recalls, at least in
his area. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters took it to #7 on Billboard
in 1960, and it stayed on the Top-40 charts for 13 weeks. But his
suggestion that it has been missing from Oldies Station Playlists is
probably also correct. I'm pretty familiar with music from that era
(first time around as well as Oldies Stations) and I barely remember
it. In contrast, the HB&TM song "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go" three
months later had pretty similar numbers (peaked at #6, but only 11
weeks in the Top-40) and probably gets 10 times the airplay or more on
the Oldies Stations that I've listened to.
Another factor may be that R&B wasn't particularly big in my neck of
the woods in 1960. It's quite possible that FPT got a lot heavier
rotation where Tom grew up than where I grew up. That may be a factor
for other people as well. FPT may have had less "crossover appeal"
than LGLGLG. That probably wouldn't affect things as much in major
urban markets as it did in Upstate NY. That might explain the
difference the first time around, but the Oldies Stations I've
listened to =have= been in major urban markets, so it's less clear why
they would have such a difference.
.
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