I love Royal Master, and it's odd that I've only previously featured one of their Christmas songs (if I recall correctly), because the company is a classic example of everything that is wrong about the song-poem industry. There's zero quality control here... they would happily take the stupidest words anyone sent them, slather on a piss-poor country backing and have one of their inept 'singers' emote over the top.
And, my friends, of the singers that they employed, Allen Scott has to be the most inept of them all.
Royal Master was owned by songwriter Alex Zanetis. Zanetis had a bone fide hit in 1964, his song As Usual was recorded by Brenda Lee and went to Number 12 on the Billboard chart. RM gave Will Gentry, a.k.a. Ramsay Kearney his first song-poem break (and encouraged Kearney to set up his own Nashco song-poem empire). A former (apparently) friend of the late Jim Reeves, Zanetis put out hundreds of compilation albums through Royal Master, most if not all having a heavily religious bias.Zanetis would later write a whole gospel country opera, The Carpenter's Son: A Musical Dramatization of the Life of Christ, a double album issued by RCA in 1973.
But who is (or was) Allen Scott?
Well, for starters, he's the same singer that appears on Nu-Sound records - yet another song-poem outfit - as Todd Andrews. Like Royal Master (or Kearney for that matter) they would issue any old garbage. Utterly mercenary. Don't forget, Kearney is the shyster who happily took his thirty pieces of silver for Blind Man's Penis.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Allen Scott does not exist, for I believe that Allen Scott/Todd Andrews is (or, again, was) a pseudonym for Alex Zanetis himself. There's no evidence of this on any of the Royal Master releases, but if you compare the voice on the Allen Scott or Todd Andrews recordings with Zanetis' own voice on his 1986 single Are You Ready For The Lord it's clearly the same person.A caveat here is that Zanetis issued an album under his own name in 1964, Writes and Sings the Stories of the Oil Fields, and the voice there is entirely different. Perhaps something happened to Zanetis between 1964 and the mid to late 70s, when Royal Master began operating, to affect his voice? I'm sure someone out there has the answer.
To add to the confusion, in 1971 Moodisc Records issued the reggae single Guilty credited to Alex Zanetis, but that is definitely not our man. This disc was actually performed by the Jolly Brothers, and I've no idea how the release came to be miscredited.
Anyway, a few examples of the artistry of Allen Scott.
Enjoy!
Download Love Letters HERE
Download Boppin' In Flip Flops HERE
Download A Corner Of Your Heart HERE
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