My mind wanders back to my youth, pretty much the same time as The Goldbergs, and I hear "my" version of Bill Baley. Much more upbeat than grandpa's version, but who sang that..? Brenda Lee? Oh wait, no: Connie Francis! Turned out, everybody and their mother has ...
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Just saw a bit of The Goldbergs, a scene where grandpa tries to sell music as a hobby to his son in law, by singing Bill Bailey while accompanying himself on the banjo.
My mind wanders back to my youth, pretty much the same time as The Goldbergs, and I hear "my" version of Bill Baley. Much more upbeat than grandpa's version, but who sang that..?
Brenda Lee? Oh wait, no: Connie Francis!
Turned out, everybody and their mother has performed Bill Bailey, and the version I remembered was indeed sung by Brenda Lee...
...who I remembered for a different song: Dynamite 😍
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=29Puat6MwpcBrenda Lee, performing "Dynamite" (1957)
(Give Gandalf a bit of time, and try one of the other backends if the video doesn't load. I'm not sending you directly to Google. If you want that, replace "invidious.nerdvpn.de" with "youtube.com".)
I have never paid much attention to lyrics in music, and in the mid and late eighties my English wasn't good enough to properly translate it to Dutch anyway, but I did understand the gist of it. Hot and naughty... 😏
Now that I am much, much older and my English is good enough to pick up subtleties like innuendo, puns and slang, and now that I know first hand what naughty things can happen on an evening together with someone hot, I wonder how much Brenda Lee understood of what she was singing... 🤔
She was only 13 when she performed Dynamite (which earned her the nickname Little Miss Dynamite)... 🤔
Great voice though: full, round and sharp, crystal clear and at times very raw 😍
That's what made me think of Connie Francis: same type of voice, same era, same music.
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=izoPQUSnnEMConnie Francis, performing "Stupid Cupid" (1958)
And no, that was not the music of the day in the mid/late eighties, in case you were wondering 😄
It wasn't the music that my parents had brought me up with either, there was "only" classical music in our house. Only between quotes, because what is colloquially known as "classical" is in fact a very broad spectrum, spanning centuries of music.
Most records in my mother's old singles collection were mid/late sixties and mostly British and French.
I had discovered this fifties rock 'n roll as a fundamentally different type of music than what I was used to, and found it very exciting, bursting with energy. Even if a bit simple and superficial...
When my class mates bought Michael Jackson, U2, New Kids on the Block and Dire Straits, I got myself Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the aforementioned ladies and quite a few more.
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