Only in Oz (10) Bill Justis - Tamoure (1963)

Another in my series of posts about tracks that were more popular in Australia than in their countries of origin. See also: Only in Melbourne.

First posted 2009, extensively revised 2023

10. Bill Justis - Tamoure (with the Stephen Scott Singers)

(Heinz Hellmer - Wolf Petersen - M. Singleton - B. Everette [pseud. Bill Justis]; arranged by Bill Justis. Based on a 1956 composition by Yves Roche)
Song also known as Tamouré (The Dance Of Love) or Vini Vini or Wini-Wini
USA 1963
Smash single (USA) #1812
Philips single (Australia) #BF-26
Australian charts: #1 Sydney #1 Melbourne #1 Brisbane #1 Adelaide #1 Perth (#1 Australia)

Strictly speaking, Tamouré has an acute accent over the 'e'. Most English databases - and the title printed on the 45 - leave it off, although it is restored on the record's sleeve.

In the annals of Only in Oz this is a classic case, an American record that topped the Australian charts¹ but only managed a ripple in the US: #7 in Chicago, #101 nationally.² As far as I can see it wasn't a hit in the UK, Europe, South Africa or even Canada where it peaked in the high thirties.

So, let's say Only in Oz.

Bill Justis (1927-1982) started out as a trumpeter, but from the early 60s he worked in Nashville as a producer, composer, arranger and musical director.³

To the record-buying public, though, Justis was probably best known for his earlier hit instrumental Raunchy (1957, #2 US), recorded at Sun Records in Memphis where he had been musical director before moving to Nashville. He played the sax on Raunchy and co-wrote it with the guitarist on the record, Sid Manker. It was the only single in Bill Justis's name to chart Top 40 in the US, but it has been much played and recorded over the years.

One notable Bill Justis enterprise in Nashville was his collaboration with keyboardist Jerry Smith as Cornbread & Jerry. Their first recording, made in Memphis before the move to Nashville, was Li'l Ole Me (covered in Australia by Warren Carr), but they later added a female chorus and put two singles onto the US charts as The Dixiebelles with Cornbread & Jerry: (Down At) Papa Joe's (1963, #9 USA) and Southtown USA (1964, #15 USA).

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Tamouré is an English-language version of a Tahitian song known as Wini-Wini or Vini Vini. The tamouré or tamure is a Tahitian dance. 

There are many recordings with variations of tamouré or vini vini in their titles, not all of them the same song.⁴ Note that the sleeve of Bill Justis's Tamoure single says THE FRENCH DANCE RAGE COMES TO AMERICA.

Whatever its traditional antecedents, the modern hit song was composed by Yves Roche (1929-2022), a French musician, producer, composer and scholar of Polynesian music who worked for Radio Tahiti and lived in Tahiti from his mid-20s until his death in 2022.

The most detailed account of the song's history I've seen is at French Wikipedia's Yves Roche article. (I think it is wrong about Nat Mara's record, though: see below.) 

I have confined myself here to some notable recordings that influenced Bill Justis's Tamoure or at least resemble it:

• Terorotua and His Tahitians - Vini Vini (USA 1958) is the original version of Bill Justis's Tamoure. It appeared on their ABC-Paramount album, Lure Of Tahiti. The writer credit is to Yves Roche.

• Nat Mara and His Tahitians - I Vini Vini Vana Vana (NZ 1962). On Viking (NZ) album VP-80 Peeping At Papeete. See listings at discogs.com and National Library NZ).
The album carries no writer credits, but French Wikipedia credits Singleton-Everette/Justis for this as an English adaptation released in 1958. The official audio of I Vini Vini Vana Vana posted by Viking at YouTube here and (from another album) here has similarities to the Bill Justis record but it isn't an English adaptation. Both are dated 1962.

•  Les Kavika - Tamouré Vini Vini (France 1962): One of four tamouré dance tracks on EP Dansez le tamouré (Vogue, France). Tamouré Vini Vini is the same song as the familiar Tamoure with French lyrics copyrighted in the US by Kavaka (real name Remy Blouin) along with the arrangement by Jacques Barouh.

• Die Tahiti Tamourés - Wini-Wini (Germany January 1963) on Polydor, a hit in 1963 in Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium. The writer credits are to Heinz Hellmer and Wolf Petersen. The arrangement sounds the same as on the Bill Justis record.

• Bill Justis - Tamoure (USA March 1963) also credits Heinz Hellmer and Wolf Petersen along with Bill Everette (Bill Justis) and Margaret Singleton (Margie Singleton?). Bill Justis is credited as arranger.

• Betty Curtis - Wini-Wini (Italy 1963) Single by Italian singer (Roberta Corti 1934-2006), peaked at #12 Italy. Credits Heinz Hellmer (see above two versions) and Italian composer-producer Vito Pallavicini.

 • Manuia and Maeva - Vini Vini (USA February 1965), single on Almo, credits Yves Roche as composer but it has fresh English lyrics written by Steve Graham and Leon Pober.
An April 1963 US copyright registration credits Roche as co-composer with Tahitian cinematographer, music collector and studio owner Gaston Guilbert, with English lyrics by Graham and Pober, and French lyrics by Roche.

• Dick and Dee Dee - Vini Vini (USA August 1965) single with the writer credit to Yves Roche

• The Originals website lists some other versions 1958-2005.

Die Tahiti-Tamourés, 1963 European hit.

Finally, a case of Not in Oz: Australians were also contrarian about Bill Justis's big hit, Raunchy (1957). It was a #2 on Billboard, #11 in the UK, but Australians preferred to put two cover versions - by Billy Vaughn and Ernie Freeman - onto the local charts. (Another version by Billy Strange popped up on our charts too, but not till 1965.) 

Thanks to Joop and Walter for lighting up this trail for me.
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Footnotes
1. Gavin Ryan's Australian chart books. In this case the other chart books agree: The Book for Sydney and Thirty Years Of Hits for Melbourne both have Tamoure at #1. See also the Top 100 Singles website, sourcing the Australian (Kent) Music Reports for 1963: #1 Australia
2. The Smash Records Story at Both Sides Now.
3. Bill Justis biography at All Music Guide.
4. A couple of examples of tamure/vini vini variations, although different songs from the Bill Justis Tamoure:(i) The Wikipedia article on tāmūrē mentions a post-World War II popularising tāmūrē song by Louis Martin.(ii) As my friend Joop Jansen points out, there is a 1930s recording by Tino Rossi, Vieni Vieni [YouTube], also recorded, for example by The Gaylords in the 50s, but again, not the song we know through Bill Justis.

Bill Justis - Tamoure (USA 1963)

Betty Curtis - Wini-Wini (Italy 1963)

Die Tahiti Tamourés - Wini-Wini (Germany 1963)

Les Kaveka - Tamouré Vini Vini (France 1962)

Nat Mara and His Tahitians - I Vini Vini Vana Vana (NZ 1962)

Terorotua and His Tahitians - Vini Vini (USA 1958)

Top 3 amusing go-go videos

At its best, go-go dancing - popularised in the discotheques of the 60s - could look spontaneous and attractive, but I suspect that conventional choreographers tended to get hold of it for rehearsed performances on TV and film.

In reverse order of risibility:

#3 From the 1966 film Out of Sight, Freddie & the Dreamers perform Funny Over You, not a bad song by the standards of its genre, 60s British Hit Machine. (Okay, I just made up that genre.) The go-go routine isn't all bad, but here and there it raises enough of a smile to compete with Freddie, a fairly amusing chap himself. The reaction of the girl tearing the lining out of her hat(?) with her teeth at 0.58 is open to interpretation.

#2 This barely squeezes into the category, because Johnny Farnham's Sadie the Cleaning Lady dancers aren't strictly go-go girls at all. The choreographer has borrowed some moves from go-go but this owes more to classical and jazz ballet. For once, a comment at YouTube is quotable: This video is creepy and disturbing.

#1 Apart from its dated, hyperactive dance moves, this has an endearing antique amateurism about it, and even the great Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs seem to have been captured on an off day. To me, this is high comedy, up there with Ze Frank's How to Dance Properly:

The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers

You never know what will pop up on that overlooked miscellany ABC2, the ABC's digital TV channel.

Last night they showed Festival, Murray Lerner's 1967 documentary about the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1966. It's a bit like a black-and-white Jazz on a Summer's Day. (In one sense especially: the crowd shots stay in the mind as much as the music.)

Every minute of it is full of interest, and everybody seems to be there: Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Odetta, Buffy Sainte-Marie. Peter Paul & Mary. Howlin' Wolf, and Son House, Dylan going electric. Bluegrass bands, jugbands, kids in the parking lot with home-made instruments. A marvellous old-time gospel choir called the Sacred Harp Singers.

But I wasn't prepared for this joyous slice of Americana. It's perfect: no commentary needed, just press Play... The Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers at YouTube

More on Andy Kirk and Killer Diller

In the late 30s when the yet-to-be-famous saxophonist Charlie Parker was fired from Jay McShann's band, on the road in Detroit, it was Andy Kirk who drove him back to New York.

That's in the book of the Ken Burns TV series Jazz. It also has a large photo of Andy Kirk's band The Twelve Clouds Of Joy. Andy Kirk is mentioned in passing, and quoted on the Kansas City scene, but more attention is given to his pianist, composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams: there is a Mary Lou Williams page at the Jazz website at PBS.

In fact, where Andy Kirk is concerned, all roads lead to Mary Lou Williams. ASV's retrospective CD Andy Kirk& the Twelve Clouds of Joy with Mary Lou Williams has 19 MLW compositions written for Kirk's orchestra, including Mess-A-Stomp, Walkin' and Swingin', In The Groove and Lotta Sax Appeal. [Amazon link]


Phil Milstein emailed to say that the George Wiltshire in the credits of Killer Diller is probably George "Teacho" Wiltshire, the musician, producer, arranger and actor whose career crossed decades and musical genres. He worked, in one capacity or another, with Louis Jordan, Thelonious Monk, Gene Pitney and The Drifters. He was a mentor to singer-songwriter Toni Wine, led an orchestra for a song-poem label, and guested in an episode of Sanford & Son. See, for example, Phil X Milstein's American Song-Poem Music Archive, and Toni Wine's website on her meeting with Teacho Wiltshire when she was an ambitious teenager.

Also, on the subject of the Katherine Dunham School of Dancing, Dave Heasman left a comment saying that Eartha Kitt was in Katherine Dunham's troupe for a while. She would've joined circa 1943, if my math is accurate, and toured the world: I doubt that she would've been one of the Varietiettes, but it's an interesting connection.

See my previous post: Andy Kirk, his Orchestra and other delights.

Andy Kirk, his Orchestra and other delights

Post updated August 2022 with new information and YouTube videos. I posted it 16 years ago and there are still some defunct links I haven't got to yet. 

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I found Andy Kirk and his Orchestra on a DVD of Killer Diller (1948). It was in one of those cheapo mega DVD packs from the supermarket, 50 movies for $29.95.

Killer Diller is a vehicle for a number of black music and vaudeville artists. The best known names in the credits might be Nat 'King' Cole, Jackie 'Moms' Mabley (she often guested on TV in the 60s) and Butterfly McQueen of Gone With The Wind fame.

It's a farce set in a variety theatre, I guess in Harlem, starring Dusty 'Open The Door Richard' Fletcher as an incompetent magician who keeps losing people in his magic wardrobes. There's a backstage romance, a bunch of bumbling cops, and lots of knockabout humour and corny jokes.
(- Where'd he go? - Down there. - How do you know? - I seen this movie before.)

Maybe you had to be there, but from this distance it looks creaky. There are compensations, though, including lindy hopping by The Congaroo Dancers and a smooth, good-humoured set by the King Cole Trio, beginning with "Ooh Kickaroonie".

Andy Kirk, tall and suave, comperes the variety show that's going on while the story gets out of control backstage, and the Andy Kirk Orchestra makes three appearances. The first, "Gator Serenade", is a locomotive, rhythmic piece that builds, showcasing the saxophonists Ray Abrams and Shirley Greene. 

Later there are some comic bits after Abrams finishes a fine solo standing front-of-stage with Kirk and Greene and returns to the ranks of the band. He repeatedly tries to rejoin Kirk and the spotlighted players out front, and is repeatedly sent back to his place by the boss, crestfallen.

 

This really swings: dare I say, it rocks? This is 1948, and all around us are the influences on rock'roll, itself just a hop, step and a jump away.

When I'm listening in this period, late 40s, early 50s, I'm like a kid camping out at night, listening for sounds in the forest. Every now and then I'll sit up, straining to hear: "Did I just hear some rock'n'roll? Off in the distance, really faint... There it is again..!"

 

Electric guitar makes you think of rock'n'roll, but by this time it wasn't unknown in jazz, and it features in the next Andy Kirk piece ("Basie Boogie"). There's a touch of bebop about this, it's not pure bop, but it  bops all right. 

Alerted by the YouTube comments thread, I'm now convinced that the guitarist is René Hall (1912-1988). His later body of work with rock and soul artists during the 50s and 60s is impressive. [Update Aug 2022]

 

Andy Kirk closes the film by announcing the dancing girls. These are The Varietiettes and they are cool: they file on in short swishy skirts and perky little hats, and they do a fairly synchronised, shuffly kind of dance with waving arms and twisty stuff, a few kicks and jumps, no fancy steps, nothing too frantic. Meanwhile, Andy & the boys try to focus on a peppy dance tune with lead guitar on "Apollo Groove".

 

The effect is unlike anything I've seen before. There's something reserved about the girls' demeanor, as though they're concentrating hard, and the musicians seem to be sharing a series of private jokes with each other. All the time there's this maddeningly catchy jump dance tune chugging along.

I hadn't heard of Andy Kirk (1898-1992), and he wasn't in any of my standard reference books (which just shows up the limitations of my jazz reference library). Turns out he was a key figure in the Kansas City jazz scene from the late 20s, with his band The Twelve Clouds of Joy.

The consensus seems to be that he was over-shadowed by such Kansas City stars as Count Basie and Benny Moten, but that he was a real contributor to the genre as a bandleader. His line-ups over the years included tenor saxophonist Dick Wilson, vocalist Pha Terrell and trumpeter Fats Navarro (none of whom are seen in Killer Diller). Even Charlie Parker was with him for a while.

In fact, these days he is usually mentioned in biographies of Mary Lou Williams, the esteemed pianist, composer and arranger who was with Andy Kirk from 1929 till 1942. Look her up: she was a star in her own right, who wrote and arranged for Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. The Mary Lou Williams Online Exhibit includes many fine photographs of her Andy Kirk days.

The Andy Kirk theme (all bands had a theme), sung by Pha Terrell, was Until The Real Thing Comes Along (1936), first recorded in '33 by Ethel Waters and also known in Fats Waller's throwaway version.

By 1948, when Killer Diller was made, the band was no longer The Twelve Clouds of Joy, Mary Lou Williams had left (there's a young guy on piano), and Andy Kirk was about to leave full-time bandleading. There's a New York Times report, archived online, about a 1982 tribute attended by Kirk, "tall, trim and vigorous" at 84. In 1989 Kirk's memoir Twenty Years On Wheels was published by University of Michigan Press.

And the Varietiettes? It crossed my mind that they might've been girlfriends of the band, recruited at the last moment, but that was unkind. They're billed as being from the Katherine Dunham School of Dancing. Katherine Dunham was a progressive and influential figure in modern black dance. For a start, see the Katherine Dunham Collection at the Library of Congress, but a Google search for "katherine dunham" + dancing gave me 110,000 results.

[See follow-up posts here and here.]

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Note on guitarist Floyd Smith (August 2022): When I wrote this post in 2006 I speculated that the guitarist seen with Andy Kirk might have been Floyd Smith. It looks as if it is in fact René Hall. It's worth noting though, that Smith, who was in Kirk's band into the late 40s, was a pioneer in helping to bring the electric guitar into jazz in the late 30s. For example, here's the All About Jazz website [archived] commenting on Charlie Christian: 1939... Charlie probably learned of the electric from Floyd Smith whose "Floyd's Guitar Blues" made with Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy is the first important use of the electric guitar. The electric guitar was almost unknown before this.

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Further reading: Commentary on Killer Diller posted in 2020 at the Monster Movie Blog.