Ye of Little Faith

Today we’re back on the abortion trail – or rather the anti-abortion trail, with a couple of tracks that get mentioned a lot on the World’s Worst Records but until now I’ve failed to post.

First up is the slick AOR sickness that is Seals and Crofts – the same guys who wrote the classic Summer Breeze – with their vile pro-life paean Unborn Child; a track so disgusting that it virtually killed their up-until-then rather successful career: the single reached a lowly 66 on the Billboard chart (their four previous singles had all hit the top 20) and, outside of Greatest Hits collections the album it came from (also called Unborn Child) was their last to enter the top 30.

Jim Seals and Darrell ‘Dash’ Crofts first met in the 1950s, both being joining a Texas doo-wop band Dean Beard and the Crew Cuts. By 1958 the pair has moved to California and joined The Champs – a band which also featured Glen Campbell and had recently scored a huge hit with the quasi-instrumental Tequila. In 1963 the pair left the Champs to join Campbell in his own band Glen Campbell and the GCs. After a couple of years the band disintegrated, and Seals and Crofts found themselves back in Texas, where they became members of a band called The Dawnbreakers. It was about this time that both Seals and Crofts became members of the Bahá'í Faith.

By 1969 the pair were performing as a duo, with Seals on guitar, saxophone and violin, and Crofts on guitar and mandolin. A couple of unsuccessful albums followed before they signed with Warner Bros. Records. Their second album for Warners - Summer Breeze - sold over one million copies and reached number 7 on the Billboard chart. The title track is best known, certainly in the UK, for being covered by the Isley Brothers.

Seals and Crofts are devotees of the Baha'i Faith, and a number of their songs contain Baha'i references or passages from Baha'i scriptures. When they appeared in concert, they would often hang around after the performance to talk about the faith and pass out literature to anyone interested. Although the duo split in 1980 after they lost their contract with Warner Bros. in both 1991 and 2004 they made brief stabs at reunions.

This particular track, Unborn Child, is another in the long line of nasty, anti-abortion rhetoric which spewed out of the States. One rather pleasing side effect of this release was that is caused pro-choice advocates to boycott the album and the duo's concerts. Take a look at some of the lyrics; they’re just vile:

Oh little baby, you'll never cry, nor will you hear a sweet lullaby.
Oh unborn child, if you only knew just what your momma was plannin' to do.
You're still a-clingin' to the tree of life, but soon you'll be cut off before you get ripe.
Oh unborn child, beginning to grow inside your momma, but you'll never know.
Oh tiny bud, that grows in the womb, only to be crushed before you can bloom.
Mama stop! Turn around; go back! Think it over.

People like this deserve to be punched in the face.

As a little extra today I bring you another disgusting anti-abortion song which, once again, has been referred to occasionally here but never before posted: L’ilMarkie’s Diary of an Unborn Child. Words fail me; a grown man pretending to be a child tries to guilt couples considering abortion into having their child by documenting its progress in the womb. It’s horrible, as you’d expect, right up until almost three minutes into the song, when Mark Fox’s creepy child-voice announces ‘December 28: today, my mother killed me’.

Based on an anonymously-credited article which appeared in Awake!, the magazine of the Jehovah's Witnesses, in 1980, Diary of an Unborn Child really is one of the most vile performances ever committed to vinyl, and as such deserves its place here among the rest of the World’s Worst Records. Enjoy!