Kay L. Gale: Composer-Singer

When I began writing this I couldn’t tell you a lot about Kay L. Gale, the woman behind today’s bagful of badness. However, by happy coincidence, someone else decided to blog about Kay at exactly the same time… that’s serendipity for you! It would be unfair of me to repeat too much of the information on her that the Hometown by Handlebar blog has gleaned, so if you’d like to know more about colourful Kay from the people who knew her I suggest you go take a look HERE 

Kay L. Gale came from Fort Worth, Texas and appears to have released these tracks sometime in the 70s: my guess would be around 1976/77 when the entire country was undergoing bicentennial fever, although How I Love That Flag was originally registered in 1971 as How I Love That Flag, Red White and Blue. Songwriting was clearly only a sideline though; Kay sold newspapers for a living outside the Fort Worth courthouse, and was a popular fixture there, always smiling and always happy to sing you a song – especially if you paid her a couple of bits.

It seems that she had been trying to make it as a songwriter and singer since the early 1950s: she registered the copyright in her first songs, Drivin’ Through Texas and You Won a Heart Yesterday in 1951, and in January 1953 she paid for an advert in trade magazine Billboard advertising her wares as composer and singer and using the Leland Hotel in Fort Worth as her address. My fellow blogger tells me that she was paying $7 a week to live at the hotel in 1960: I guess that seven years prior to that the rent must have been significantly cheaper.

1971, the year she wrote How I Love That Flag, was a busy year for our Kay: she registered copyright in no less than 11 further songs: Come Into My Heart, Fairy Tales for Children, I Love That Bright Green Christmas Tree, If Christmas Could Come to Every Heart, I’m a Poor Poor Peon (The Peon Song) [a derogatory term for a Spanish-American day labourer or unskilled farm worker], It’s Christmas a Happy Christmas Because Someone Loves You, Love Sweet Love, Nickel Beer and Free Lunch, Silver Dollars, The Things That Love Can Do and When God Is With You.

Not a lot happened on the songwriting front for Kay until 1976 when, perhaps in a fit of concern perchance over someone nabbing her work or possibly because she had just recorded her first single, she suddenly decided to copyright another seven songs, including several patriotic anthems, under the name Kay L Millions: Beautiful Are the Roses, The Beautiful Land of the Free, Grand Old Liberty Bell, Tears In My Heart and What a Wonderful World Would Be and Your Love Is Sunshine to Me. She also registered another batch of seven compositions the following year, this time under her given name: Amigos, Fort Worth, Gold Dust, It’s Time to Hear Again ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’, Just Say ‘I Love You’, The Things That Love Can Do (again), and That Old-Fashioned Hayride. The fact that Kay chose to re-register The Things That Love Can Do leads me to speculate that she may well have recorded this song around the same time as Fort Worth Texas (notice the subtle change of name), which appears as an extra track on the download version of Irwin Chusid’s Songs In the Key Oz Z Volume Two.

Kay died in November 1983, sadly leaving no relatives. Luckily she left us a couple of amazing 45s. Here are three of the tracks from Kay’s two known 45 How I Love That Flag, the Team Song of the Dallas Cowboys and Fort Worth Texas. If anyone has that missing fourth track (possibly The Things That Love Can Do) I would be eternally grateful!

Enjoy!

Download Flag HERE

Download Cowboys HERE

Download Texas HERE