A couple of tracks today from the gloriously off-key Edna
Mae Henning, pianist, empress of Henning Surprise Records and songwriter of the
most authentic country-western songs you’re ever likely to hear.
What do we know about Pennsylvania housewife and outsider
musician Edna Mae? Not a lot, actually. Born Edna Mae Wynegar, it appears that
she had been bitten by the songwriting bug by the early 1970s, registering copyright
for her compositions If You See My Baby, It’s Love, Love, Love and Walking
and Talking Over You in 1973. She would later record If You See My Baby
for her debut EP, released in 1979. Edna Mae would go on to issue at least five
self-financed 45s and a couple of EPs between 1979 and 1988 (by which time
Henning Surprise Records had simplified their name to Surprise), and in 1985
was placed third in the ‘over 21s’ group in a local talent competition.
In the late 1980s, having had no success with her
recordings, despite having sent thousands of free copies to radio stations across
the States, she fell victim to one of those unscrupulous ‘print your poetry for
cash’ schemes. Operating for decades, these scams work in exactly the same way
as song-poem enterprises, only this time instead of getting a few copies of a
recording for your money, Edna instead saw her poem Abortion (yes, it’s
exactly what you would expect) printed in a volume luxuriating in the title Great
Poems of the Western World Volume II in 1990. It seems that Edna Mae
decided not to cough up the few extra bucks to have her photograph included alongside
her words. Three years later the publishers of that book went bankrupt.
I believe she’s still with us, still living in Pennsylvania,
surrounded by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Apparently Edna
was still recording her own compositions as late as 2011 and, according to a
post on the Waxidermy blog back in 2008, claimed at that point to have
penned some 10,000 songs.
I love the sound of her discs: the upright piano and
yearning vocals put me in mind of barroom ballads of the old West. I picture her in
Victorian garb, lots of lace, banging away at a honky-tonk piano in the corner
of the room while cowboys and prospectors drink, gamble and brawl, Edna Mae
occasionally ducking out of the way of a flying bottle or stray bullet, valiantly
playing on.
From her debut EP, issued in January 1979 (which, just to confound
discography compilers, has the company credited Henning’s Surprise Records on
the A-side; the flip features no apostrophe), here’s Mama, Forgive Your
Truckin’ Man and, from the topside of her 1985 single, I Can’t Get Over
You.
Enjoy!
Download Truckin’ HERE
Download Get Over HERE
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