At a time when adults still accounted for nearly all LP sales, the Hollyridge Strings cut a series of albums covering Elvis, Beatles, Four Seasons, and Beach Boys songs that are now top 40 staples. Many imitators followed their lead. (The beautiful music version of "I Got You Babe" simply must be heard to be appreciated.) Budget label albums of covers, often from a single year, by groups with names like The Now Generation, were also quickly recorded and issued. Then there’s the HIT label.
It issued generic covers of hit (what else?) songs of the day, selling them for 39 cents in drugstores and five-and-tens to unsuspecting adults who thought they were getting the real thing at a bargain price. Its cover of "Dominique," a 1963 French language #1 by The Singing Nun -- speaking of outsider music -- is wonderful, and refreshing, and dreadful, and everything else the Shaggs are. After hearing it, I had to play la soeur chantant’s original to wipe the HIT singer’s bad French from my short-term memory.
Low-priced imitations did bring the music to people who may not have otherwise heard it. They still weren’t as Everyman as the most populist kind of outsider music: the song poem.
Song-poems
"Poems Wanted To Be Set To Music." "Songs Needed." "YOU Can Be A Professional Songwriter."
So said the classified ads I found in the back pages of comic books and baseball magazines. They sounded promising. I reasoned that, if the path to stardom was that wide, there had to be a catch. There was.
Anyone could have a poem set to music and recorded, but only after paying the recording company to do it; in the same way writers pay "vanity" publishers to print their stories. Studios specializing in song-poems were really factories in which dozens could be recorded in one day, one after the other. The band usually got its first look at the song a few minutes before cutting it in one take. Only musicians andsingers with exceptional talent can sight-read musio, or sight-sing lyrics, under song-poem studio conditions.
The personal nature of poetry lent itself to some evocative song titles: "Disco Dancer, You’re The Answer." "Betsy And Her Goat." "I Am A Ginseng Digger." "Santa Claus Goes Modern." (Songs that dare you to listen to them.)
For the fee, the writer got a few boxes of 45s to promote and sell themselves, or to show friends to prove that there actually was a record with their name on it. Suspicious-looking thrift store 45s with weird titles and little or no information on the labels, and albums of songs with weird titles, might just contain undiscovered song-poem gems.