Rodd and Friends

Happy almost New Year, my friends.

A couple of tracks from song-poem sensation Rodd Keith for you today, in fact, both sides of a Preview 45 from late 1967, Nobody Knows What Love Will Do (written by Lon Streator), and Friends Are Few, from Eleanora Smalls. Our friend Bob Purse did blog this disc six years ago, but those links are currently inactive so, for now, this is (I believe) the only place you can find them.

Nobody Knows What Love Will Do is easily the better of the two tracks, Rodd and his band have spent some time working on this, and the result is a pretty decent swing number. Sadly the same cannot be said of the flip side, Friends Are Few, a dull little song with ridiculous lyrics that is only just raised from the level of the mundane by Rodd’s delivery. 

The female backing singer on Friends Are Few is unnamed, but I’d guess that it’s Nita Thomas (also known as Neda Carr and Nita Craig), who Rodd worked with a fair bit around the same time as this was recorded: it doesn’t sound like Bonnie Graham, his other regular collaborator, but I could be wrong. Unfortunately Preview chose not to credit her, and it’s always hard distinguishing who is who, as so many of the musicians at Preview worked under a variety of different names while they were at the company. Rodd, for example, worked as Rodd Keith, Rood Keith, Dan Monday, Ken Roberts, Milford Perkins (although the Milford Perkins that sang Duck Egg Walk is clearly a different singer) and so on. 

I can tell you nothing about Lon Streator, as far as I am aware he did not submit any other compositions to song-poem outfits, and I can find no other copyright entry for him. However, Eleanora Smalls was a habitual miscreant, writing the words to the songs Like God We Should Try To Be and Nobody Walks Alone, which she submitted to Lew Tobin’s Sterling company in 1965. I cannot tell you if they were recorded, but both songs were copyrighted (with music by Tobin), in March of that year, and there’s a very good chance they at least made it as far as the demo/acetate stage. Eleanora had another song recorded by Rodd for Preview, Mother’s Room, issued shortly before this particular disc and probably submitted at the same time.

Anyway,  enjoy these and I’ll see you all in the New Year!

Download Nobody HERE

Download Friends HERE