▶︎ Hal Saunders: songwriter, playwright, printmaker and more

Hal Saunders (1904-1991) was born James Hallett Saunders in Armidale NSW. He was a prolific songwriter who made a name for himself writing radio serials from the mid-1930s before going into the music business in the 50s and 60s. He was also a visual artist specialising in etching and printmaking. 

On his retirement from Festival Records in 1965 (noted in Billboard and Cash Box), Saunders was referred to as a producer, composer, arranger and musical director. That is a good start, but it leaves out lyricist, adapter, jingle-writer, scriptwriter, A&R man, pianist and bandleader. 

Michael Looper has tracked Saunders' job titles at Festival from 1954 to 1960: musical director, musical consultant in charge of local recording activities, recording supervisor and assistant A&R manager. He was a prominent office-holder and advocate in songwriters' associations including APRA in the late 40s-early 50s. 

Women's Weekly 6 June 62 [source]

Anyone who digs into the history of Australian popular music will come across Saunders' name in songwriting credits. In 1949, when he was President of The Australian Composers and Songwriters' Association, the Sydney Morning Herald called him Australia's most prolific songwriter who had copyrighted about 1,000 songs from the previous 15 years.¹ He often worked behind the scenes, for example when he produced Lucky Starr's hit I've Been Everywhere (1962) without any credit on the label. 

In the first half of the 1960s he wrote and (mainly) co-wrote for the latest crop of young pop stars at Festival. Frequent among his collaborators were influential Festival A&R man Ken Taylor and the multi-talented Franz Conde, at this time time a musical director at Festival. 

With Taylor, Saunders wrote or arranged for Vic Sabrino, Johnny Devlin and Ray Melton. With Conde, there were a lot of adaptations: traditional children's songs, a Christmas EP for Noeleen Batley, and an EP of traditional celebration songs for Col Joye. 

As an adapter, Saunders also contributed to Jimmy Little's hit version of the old gospel song Royal Telephone (1963), and he wrote the English lyrics for Noeleen Batley's Little Treasure From Japan (1964) from the Japanese song Konnichiwa Akachan. April Byron, Judy Stone, Patty Markham, Noeleen Batley, and Lana Cantrell all recorded tracks with credits to Hal Saunders as writer, co-writer or adapter. 

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It is hard to say where Saunders contributed as composer or lyricist in his collaborations, but he was capable of either. 

As a pianist in the 1930s he had led a swing quartet, Hal's Vagabonds, for at least one gig in Northern NSW, and his job descriptions at Festival included arranging and musical direction. Besides, his solo compositions confirm that he write both lyrics and music. 

As for lyrics, when Peter Scriven produced Tintookies (1956), his well-known marionette musical for children, Saunders wrote the book and the lyrics. 

For Nex'Town (1957), a musical devised and produced by Scriven, Saunders co-wrote the music and lyrics. His collaborator on Nex'Town, Iris Mason, later co-wrote the music for Saunders' own work for marionettes, Tales From Noonameena: an Operetta for Children (1973), staged at the opening of the Sydney Opera House.

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Saunders' ability as a lyricist is unsurprising. He had started earning a living as a writer for Sydney radio during the 1930s when he wrote advertising copy and lyrics for jingles, but he went on to become one of the top radio playwrights in the country. 

Nov 1935 [full story]

He is often identified with his popular serial The Black Spider (1935), a mystery set in Sydney that was first aired on 2KY, later on 3XY and other stations. A novelisation was published by Magpie Books in 1945.

A Sydney newspaper story in November 1935 announces the final episode of The Black Spider, but plugs a forthcoming comedy by Saunders, Gambler's Luck, as well as his Sunday morning adventure serial Jack Strong's Gold Reef. A few weeks later 2KY was airing Saunders' true-crime-based serial Sydney's Crime Sheet (early 1936), apparently commissioned in response to a similar show on another station.

This activity signalled a boom time for Australian radio that would last into the 1950s, an era when Australian variety and drama dominated programming. As Will Newton puts it in an overview of the period, I have always thought that Australian radio drama came into its own thanks, largely, to Hal Saunders. 

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Away from the performing arts, the Australian Prints + Printmaking website has information about Hal Saunders, a print-seller, printer, printmaker, publisher, and writer, noted for his etchings. 

A reader might not guess that this is Hal Saunders the A&R man or the writer of The Black Spider, but the connection is made clear in a February 1937 Wireless Weekly article. Saunders talks about a medical crisis that forced him to abandon an earlier career in the legal profession. After recovering, he studied Art, and in 1928 he "toured New Zealand on behalf of the Commonwealth Government with paintings and etchings by Australian artists".

At the time of the Wireless Weekly article, Saunders had just written Hotel Revue, a musical comedy for radio with music by pianist Cliff Arnold. 

Saunders says he "brought along half a dozen melodies" to the first meeting with Arnold but confessed his "knowledge of music was non est". Perhaps this meant that he lacked knowledge of musical technicalities, or perhaps he was being modest, or just building a narrative. Whatever the explanation, by December of 1937 he knew enough to handle the piano in Hal's Vagabonds, and by 1954 he was a musical director at Festival Records. 

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1. It is hard to verify the 1949 reporter's figure of about 1,000 songs in 15 years, but a song every 5½ days or so seems doable. Besides, Saunders' voluminous output as a radio playwright shows that he had the drive and ability to work quickly and prolifically.

Sources
• Many newspaper and magazine articles at Trove.com.au, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchives.com, so allow for reporters' errors and recycling of promotional material. See links in the text and email me for more.
• Discographic data at 45cat.com, 45worlds.com and Discogs.com.
• Nancy Bridges, Wonderful Wireless (1983) pp 48-50
• Will Newton. "Wonderful World of Wireless: Golden Years of Radio", Sutherland Shire Historical Society Inc Quarterly Bulletin, February 1993

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The Black Spider premières, October 1935 [source]

   To-night at 6.45. the first episode in “The Black Spider,” a 2KY mystery thriller, will be presented. Written by Hal Saunders, 2KY Playwright, “The Black Spider,” is a gripping story of crime and murder set in and around Sydney. The ingenuity of "The Black Spider" and his gang tests to the utmost the skill of Inspector McMillan and his colleague. Martin Purlow, the famous detective.  Besides the intense and exciting action which permeates the whole of this story, the author has introduced a generous splash of mystery, which makes it safe to assume that right until the final episode the true identity of "The Black Spider" cannot even be suspected.  In the presentation of this original all-Australian serial. 2KY is definitely making radio history, for this is the first occasion on which a serial of this type has been featured by any Australian broadcasting station. Included in the cast are: Dan Weldon, George Jennings, Harry McDonald, and Sylvia Post Mason.

February 1936: Sydney's Crime Sheet [source]

September 1940: The Secret of Smokyville [source]

▶︎ Just Out of Reach: The Stewart Family on KLCN Blytheville

"Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)" by The Stewart Family was the original version of the song. Written by V.F. 'Pappy' Stewart, it was released in 1951 on Bill McCall’s Los Angeles label Gilt-Edge. The group also had records issued on affiliated label 4 Star.

Dozens of other versions of the song, many by major artists, have been released since early cover versions by Faron Young (1952, B-side on Capitol) and by Bonnie Lou (1953, B-side on King). The Originals website lists a selection of 15 versions, and Cover.info lists 55.

Bunny Walters charted #21 in New Zealand with his version in 1970, hence my interest in it.

Pappy Stewart in 1976 (local news story).

The Stewart Family was a real family, a country and gospel group led by Virgil F. “Pappy” Stewart (1907-1988), a Blytheville, Arkansas soybean grower and the composer of Just Out Of Reach, .

The Stewarts were one of several family musical groups in the area at this time. They were part of a thriving country, hillbilly and gospel music scene nurtured in the 1930s and 40s by local radio stations like KLCN in Blytheville and KOSE in nearby Osceola. 

In 1970, Blytheville journalist Jim Branum noted that KLCN has done as much for country artists than any other station its size in the nation, and acknowledged the prevalence of family groups amongst hillbilly artists.

The Stewart family worked a farm, but they were also musicians, and they married musicians, and they had neighbours who were musicians. The names of Stewart family and friends appear in the line-ups of multiple groups on local radio, and at local events like the National Cotton Picking Contest. 

Some of these artists cut some records on minor labels, but Pappy Stewart’s extraordinary success with Just Out Of Reach, and his connection with the music stars who recorded it, is an outlier in a mainly localised industry.

Pappy, his two daughters, and his sister appeared regularly on KLCN Blytheville from 1934 after they convinced the station to give them a regular 15-minute segment. They toured extensively around the region until 1953. The band broke up as the daughters began raising families of their own.

The family was billed at local events as Pappy Stewart’s Family or Pappy Stewart And His Famous Family. For a gig in Charleston, Missouri in October 1945 they were advertised as “Pap Stewart And His Arkansas Cowgirls of Radio Station KLCN, Blytheville“.

In 1951 the line-up was Pappy Stewart (guitar), his daughters Bethyl (fiddle and vocals) and Janet (bass violin), his multi-instrumental sister Baba Howard (mainly accordion) and Bethyl’s husband Buddy Brown.

Baba had also been heard on KLCN in Don & Baba Howard & Their Smiling Hillbillies (clearly along similar lines to Don Howard and His Smiling Hillbilly Gang and Donald Howard and His Smiling Hillbillies, also spotted in the archives).

Also touring with the Stewarts during this period were Wilma Scott and Don Whitney.

Wilma Scott was from Blytheville too, and had been in the Burdette Girls Quartet with Bethyl, Janet and Baba Stewart in the early 1940s. Don Whitney (1926-1985), from nearby Osceola, also worked solo, on stage as Arkansas’ Biggest Hillbilly and on several discs on the 4 Star label. He was a disc jockey at KLCN Blythedale and at KOSE Osceola where he became general manager.

Apart from Just Out Of Reach, Pappy Stewart was a prolific songwriter who had a number of other songs recorded by other artists including Patsy Cline. Many of the songs in the family’s repertoire were written by Pappy or his sister Baba.

When interviewed in 1976 for a profile in Blytheville’s Courier-News, Pappy Stewart was 68 years old and had been married to Gladys for 50 years. He was long retired from professional music and happily living and working on his farm. His sister Baba, who was much younger than Pappy, died in Blythedale in 2013, aged 87.

I’m just a country boy. I’d rather farm as do anything. I’m doing what I want to do.

Pappy Stewart to Jack Weatherly, The Courier-News, 1976

National Cotton Picking Contest 1949

 

This content was first published at my website in my history of Just Out Of Reach. See there for selected sources.

▶︎ The Town & Country Brothers: the definitive account

After my recent post about The Town & Country Brothers and Sandy, Sandy, their 1963 Only In Oz hit, I heard from Ted Daryll, a member of the group and the writer of Sandy, Sandy.

Ted sent me his definitive account of the group. Not only does it retell the full recording adventures of Ted with Chip Taylor and Greg Richards, but it opens a fascinating window into a music business that no longer exists in quite the same form.

Rather than summarising it, I am giving you the whole document, a PopArchives exclusive, with Ted's approval.

Read the full story by clicking here (link to PDF at iCloud).

The Town & Country Brothers: Ted (left) - Chip (right). 1962 photo taken at Adelphi Recording, 1650 Broadway, NYC (Image: Ted Daryll)

▶︎ The small print: Ed Goldman, writer of Billy You're My Friend

Last month I wondered about the writer of Billy You're My Friend, Gene Pitney's minor hit from 1968. It's one of those unique songs that you never forget, the one-off that comes out of nowhere and leaves you with few clues about its background story.

A couple of days ago Ed Goldman emailed me, after he'd read my post.

Ed tells me he wrote Billy You're My Friend when he was a piano major at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. He’d worked in music publishing as a staff songwriter, usually working with a regular lyricist partner, but when producer Bob Schwartz was looking for a song for Gene Pitney, “a single that would bring him more into what was then the current style”, Ed ended up writing both words and music himself.

This is how it came about, as Ed tells it:

My partner at the time and I had interested a producer at Musicor Records in a kind of poetic, Sergeant Pepper's type tune called Poor Richard, which I demonstrated on the piano, improvising a fugue-like break.

The producer, Bob Schwartz, loved it, but it was already published by another company. He said Gene Pitney was going into the studio in a few days… and he wanted something in the style I had demonstrated on the piano.

The next day I sat down with my lyricist, but we couldn't see eye to eye (or ear to ear) on anything that day. I already had most of the tune and the first verse of the lyric, but he didn't relate to it, and he wasn't coming up with anything either, so I finished it on my own and brought it to Bob the next day.

Bob said, “That's it!” and went on to bring in an arranger... Joe Scott to soup up the break and arrangement into this big orchestral sound. He billed it as 'symphonic rock' and the record was made about a week later.

Although he was quite excited about the finished product, Ed comments on the interpretation and arrangement:

I felt to a degree that the song was made too grandiose for what it was, and who Gene was as a song stylist. My feeling about the song was that it was a kind of chamber piece that first expressed the innocence and trust a young man had for his best friend, then the anger he felt when he discovered that both his friend and girlfriend had betrayed him.

Ed Goldman’s heart was in jazz and the classics, and for many years he played piano around the New York area before returning to Juilliard in the 90s to study composition and orchestration. He has written music for TV soap operas and advertising jingles, but he now concentrates on writing and recording in his home studio, putting down all the parts himself - and he still writes his own lyrics. Ed’s current projects include a Broadway show, a CD of his own songs, and recordings of classical piano pieces including his own compositions.

On the uniqueness of Billy You’re My Friend, Ed comments:

My approach to that song, and most of those I wrote, was to be true to what the song itself seemed to want to say, even if I sometimes had to transcend pop songwriting conventions to do so. This is what I believe gave the song its individualistic flavour.

As a compulsive reader of the small print on record labels, I can't tell you how satisfying it is to have heard from (E. Goldman) and to be able to write about him here.

▶︎ At last: the Nick Lampe story

In his professional musical career Nick Lampe sang in a 50s doowop group, toured with Alan Freed, hung out with Dion and Kenny Rankin in Manhattan, recorded an album at Muscle Shoals and, incidentally, put a single onto the charts in Melbourne, Australia. After that, he quit the business, headed for the mountains for a while, and ended up studying for a degree in Psychology. For years now he's been a social worker with disabled people in New York.

Nick Lampe's full name is Nicholas Lampariello. He is a New Yorker, born in Brooklyn, whose musical career goes back to the mid-50s, when he first appeared in the doowop group The Bop Tones on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour.

Out of those early TV appearances came the release of a Bop Tones single on Ember, I Had A Love (an original by the four group members) with the B-side (Be My) Pussy Cat (1958). The Bop Tones toured with Alan Freed, the original rock’n’roll disc jockey who put on shows packed with current singing stars.

(Brian Lee, at doowop site ColorRadio.com, tells me The Bop Tones were from the Bensonhurst-Coney Island section of Brooklyn and the other members, apart from Nick Lampariello, were Bob Kutner, John Ench and Dave Antebi.)

Later, in the 60s, Nick Lampe appeared at The Improvisation and The Scene in Manhattan, in off-Broadway shows, and on the Steve Allen and Pat Boone TV shows. Among his friends and colleagues at this time were Richard Pryor, Richie Havens and two of his mentors, Kenny Rankin and Dion Di Mucci, both credited as spiritual advisors in the notes to Nick's 1970 album It Happened Long Ago.

After heading for Los Angeles, where he appeared at The Troubador, Nick tried his luck with local record companies and was signed to Atlantic. In 1970 he recorded his solo album of original songs for the Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama. Flower Garden was the opening track, and it was the single that charted in Melbourne, released in Australia on Atlantic through Festival Records (above).

Nick left the music business for a mixture of artistic and personal reasons.

He had complained to Atlantic chairman and producerArmet Ertegun when he heard the finished version of his album, which added strings and chorus to his six-piece studio sessions. Nick believes his “art had been bastardized with bubblegum”, but that’s how it was released.

In the end, Nick and his first wife moved to the mountains of Northern California with their young son (he appears with Nick on the album sleeve of It Happened Long Ago, right). At this time, Nick’s wife was attempting to recover from the devastating effects of marijuana that had been covertly laced with PCP. During this period, Nick supported his family by playing in bars and on street corners in San Francisco, and later at Lake Tahoe, the Californian ski resort.

Eventually, Nick Lampariello remarried, moved to British Columbia to study for his BA in Psychology, and became a counsellor to victims of abuse.

Nowadays Nick works with disabled children in New York, helping them to develop essential life skills. He says: I don't make much money but I get a lot of love… I'm called Uncle Nicky by some 150 individuals who at one time may not have been able to speak: can't put a price on that. Musically I lead worship for three ministries and consequently I am always involved with music.

I still have my guitar, an old Martin D-18. It's about forty years old and is my love...

(Source: Nicholas Lampariello, by email.
Thanks also to Robert Thompson)