“Damn Tooting,” said Lucy, and that was the inspiration for The Best Damn Dance Band in the Land.

As I reflect back on it all now (“it all” meaning the formation of our orchestra: Ira Ironstrings, The Best Damn Dance Band in the Land), it must have been divinely blessed. Things Good like that just don’t happen every day in North Crumble. Not by a long shot.

I think it’s important that the world-at-large know about the day our orchestra was formed…for posterity’s sake, and also because we all get fed up with visiting anthropologists messing up the Good Life here in Macon County with their deep, probing questions. So here goes:

Actually, it was a non-Ironstrings but a fast-friend — Lucy N. Fairweather, our percussionist and Moral Beacon — who inspired us to form our orchestra. that sweet, grey-haired old lady had been passed out in our setting-room rocker for eleven days, just a-rocking and eyeing the bougainvillaea. Came the fateful evening, April 11, 1930. A typical Ironstrings family scene at dusk: the sun falling behind the Ice House, scented breezes wafting in from Kissing Bog, and the whole Ironstrings clan gathered underneath the creeping veranda. Lucy looked up at us Ironstrings, rubbed her antimacassars (which had been ailing of late), smiled benignly, and said, “You Clydes oughta do something about Dance Music. It’s damn well going to the dogs, and tha’s a fact.”

Well sir, we Ironstrings galvanized into action. After flooring the old lady with a feint to the mid-section and a mean right hook, I asked here just what more we could do. Already we had founded a fund to preserve used Andy Kirk 78’s. “Nothing more can be done!” we said, almost to a man. (“Almost,” because Armando Lauderdale had carried the maid, Thelma N. (for Nothing) Edison, off to Kissing Bog and couldn’t be contacted nohow.)

To tell the truth, Lucy was fit to be tied. (In fact, we had to forcibly restrain Polly Paradiddle, who was coming at her with a hunk of hemp and a mean glint in her good eye.) Lucy spoke up just in time. Saluting the colors, she said, “True grey Southerners! Be creative as all get out about the Dance Music Problem!” Taking it as her personal mission, she hailed a passing Red Cross van, clambered up on the hood, and stamped her right foot for attention. “Ira Ironstrings, Friends, and you Crumbums in the ally there,” she spake, still stamping her right foot for attention and also because the sole of her sneaker was flapping some. “I has come up with something, and in sheer reverence to this old grey head and also because I holds the notes on all your instruments, I think that mayhap we oughta form an orchestra! Horray!”

“Horray,” we answered, to a man. (Armando was back now, picking nettles out of his spats.)

“Damn tooting,” said sweet good grey-haired motherly affectionate Lucy.

That did it!

“Tooting!” I cried out. “That’s our answer!”

“The child’s been tetched since the day of the borning,” said Lucy, “and that’s a fact o’ nature.”

“Fellow Red Necks,” addressed I (never dreaming that this was the birth of what would serve in years yet unborn as a true elocutionary gift). “Tooting! Dwell on that word a mo’. Today in music everyone is ‘blowing!’ Every Man Jack of you has been faced with music that’s been blown! Bring back the Toot, say I.”

As if to emphasize my stand, Gutbucket Avakian, the Armenian Red Cross driver, gave his truck horn a whomp with his elbow. Toot, it went. Toot it kept on wenting. Stuck, it was.

“Crazy, pops,” said Thurston, my Portuguese step-sister, running toward the stuck horn, “G Sharp.” Pulling her trusty tuba out of her satchel, she ran off a wicked vamp. Lucy stomped her foot faster. “You fat heads are swingin’ now,” she wheezed.

Frenzy set in.

Maxwell Suggins (tenor washboard and temple bells) had tooted up a heavy four-beat rhythm on his “board.” Tanya Blackberry tooted a joyous cadenza on her three-string Woolworth guaranteed banjo, c. 1907. Reminding us all of a young Teschemacher, Hot Lips Skorstad tooted variations of “A Train” on kazoo, enough to make strong men weep.

I whooped, “Now we’re Tooting, bless our cute little hearts. Now we sound like The Best Bamn Bance Dand in the Land!” (I never could say it fast.)

Hearts full and feet a-flap, our 12 Hot Licks o’ Rhythm kept it up far into the night. As luck would have it, little Samuel F. B. Marconi, boy inventor, warmed up his cactus-needle recorder, the better to preserve all this on wax (as they say in Show Biz). Good thing, too, for you can now hear, at a ridiculously low price, The Best Damn Bance Dand In the Land.

Recorded April 11 and a hunk of April 12, 1930, in North Crumble, Macon County, Georgia, without benefit of clergy.

For your further dancing pleasure, may we suggest:

SORTA-MAY by Billy May, Capitol 562
HAWAIIAN WAR CHANT by Tommy Dorsey, RCA Victor 1234
CHARLESTONS by Ira Ironstrings, Warner Bros. 1297
GLENN MILLER, Epic 3236

Side One:

1. Across the Alley From the Alamo (2:12)
2. The Blacksmith Blues (2:10)
3. The Surrey With the Fringe On Top (2:21)
4. Down By the Station (2:05)
5. Christopher Columbus (2:48)
6. Mountain Greenery (2:43)

Side Two:

1. Jingle Jangle Jingle (2:33)
2. Little Brown Jug (2:26)
3. Jambalaya (2:00)
4. The Huckle-Buck (3:01)
5. I’d’ve Baked A Cake (2:22)
6. Last Night On the Back Porch (2:05)

PRODUCED BY LOU BUSCH

VITAPHONIC HIGH FIDELITY
WARNER BROS. HIGH FIDELITY

MONOPHONIC W 1380

A Touch of Folksy, Nostalgic Old Hawaii

One of the most exciting things that can happen to a person is a real, honest-to-goodness Hawaiian party. It can happen any place, any time, and it’s very likely to be impromptu. Conviviality reigns. Food and drink are abundant. Everybody sings and dances. Most play one or more instruments. Ukuleles appear from nowhere, and if you’re very lucky there’s a slack key guitarist among the group…or someone rounds him up. The music is sure to begin at a lively tempo with hulas familiar to all. As the party progresses, the mood becomes more sentimental. Later the less familiar numbers begin to creep in as each artist performs his special numbers, sometimes a piece handed down to him in secrecy by an older member of his family.

These Hawaiian party songs are many things: sweet and sentimental; playful and peppy; sensuous and suggestive; nostalgic, reverent. But above all they are rhythmical, for Hawaiians are a people who dance their songs, and the rhythms of the earth are strong in these exuberant people.

Slack Key Guitar Indigenous to Hawaii

A unique guitar technique, peculiar to The Islands, slack key almost defies description. Basically an unusual tuning (and there are several different slack key tunings, including two known as “Wahine” and “Maunaloa”) in which the tension is lowered to produce a deep, vibrant tone, this difficult method has been handed down by demonstration. There are no written instructions.

Admired and respected as a style, slack key evolved, probably in the 1880’s, from the Spanish guitar brought to Hawaii by sailors aboard whaling ships of the early 19th century.

Slack key is related in philosophy and attitude to flamenco, a sort of gypsy jazz, in that its essence is improvisation and its rhythms are the heartbeat of the folk.

Leonard Kwan, our slack key guitarist for this album, is one of the few younger musicians of Hawaii who have mastered the style. A versatile musician, he plays many string instruments.

about the selections…

Side One:

1. Haleakala Hula (2:38), snappy and happy-hearted, concerns the fascinating beauty of Haleakala—not a lovely little brown gal but—the world’s largest dormant volcano…Haleakala, “House of the Sun,” on the island of Maui.

2. Po Mahina (3:03)—a slow, dreamy-voiced tune backed by the steady, sensuous beat of the slack key guitar—suggests, even to the ear unfamiliar with Hawaiian words, a romantic moonlight night. And that’s precisely what “Po Mahina” is all about…it’s a love song of a couple walking in the moonlight.

3. A Song to Hawaii (2:33) explains that, in Hawaii, the spirit of Aloha begins with the elements: the wind, the waves, even the flowers. With simplicity and reverence, Bob Pauhale Davis sings this tribute to the land of his birth—Hawaii, now the Aloha state.

4. Manini Chimes (1:11) is a new title to an old tune. It is a brief slack key “excercise” handed down by tune and technique, but not by name, to our artist from his uncle. In this, its first recording, it’s christened “Manini,” a lively pint-sized number, or literally, “alert little fish.”

5. He Aloha No Honolulu (2:16), to hula enthusiasts immediately suggests a line of quick-stepping hula girls, naughty-sweet in their swishing ti-leaf skirts. With diamond-bright eyes they sing of the excitement of a trip from Honolulu to the big island of Hawaii and of the sights along the way.

6. Kahoolawe Hula (2:41), for all its melodious and rhythmical appeal, describes the island of Kahoolawe, always a harsh, dry island where few but goats have ever lived. today it is a barren, and (though it is not expressed in the song) pock-marked island of exploded and unexploded shells, a military target isle.

Side Two:

1. Opihi Moemoe (3:00) was recorded earlier as a single record, and as such this lively number with a magnetic beat has had a great deal to do with Leonard Kwan’s rapidly growing popularity as a slack key artist in Hawaii. The piece, a no-name hand-me-down for generations, is now called “Sleepy Opihi” (tiny shellfish).

2. Noho Paipai (2:22) is the “Rocking Chair” hula, in which the vocal portion is almost sleepy, while the syncopation of slack key accompaniment is rather rhumba-like. The lyrics are romantic: the poet yearns for his love, whom he has kissed as a stranger.

3. Yellow Ginger Lei (2:34) is sweet and slow, and this tremolo slack key version gives a vibrant quality appropriate to a hula about a fragile flower. The yellow ginger is a favorite island blossom, delicate and of spicy fragrance, which blooms in moist, verdant valleys.

4. “Susy” Ana E (2:49), lively and saucy, is a typical Hawaiian hula. It was written in admiration of a girl called “Susy” Ana, a girl with pretty eyes, a girl who goes swimming and fishing with her kane (man).

5. Nahenahe (1:50), another traditional tune with a new title, suggests sweet music, soft winds, gentle manners. Our slack key version reveals a strong Spanish influence, remembering slow, formal patterns of dance, courtly manners, and then…provocative castanets.

6. Ahi Wela (2:58), “Love Hot as Fire,” is an old and well-loved song in which Hawaiians use the hymn-like style of singing brought to them by New England missionaries…to tell of a passionate, all-consuming love.

the artists:

Leonard Kwan, slack key guitar and mandolin
Bob Pauhale Davis, baritone
The Kamaha’os Trio: Kalona Manning, Kaua Ioane, Kape Kauhane
Thomas Kaheiki, bass
William Kaawa, guitar

Notes by: Mazeppa Costa & Margaret Williams
Cover by: Allison-Nieman Graphic Design Associates, Honolulu
Published by: Tradewinds Records, Honolulu

TS-102

(Another thrift-store find, this one. The great 60’s era graphic design and wonderful title caught my eye. The music isn’t bad, but doesn’t grab me as much as many other find have, but that’s all part of the fun of randomly grabbing old records.)