Puppets for Praise

I'm off on a well-deserved and much-needed holiday from today, but before I go here's a real treat for you, the whole of one of the more obscure Little Marcy albums, The Jesus Story. The information below originally appeared in my first book, The World's Worst Records Volume One.

The product of a devoutly religious family, young Marcellaise ‘Marcy’ Hartwick was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas. She studied piano and trombone as a child. Moving to Portland, Oregon, the committed Christian married the equally religious Malcolm Everett Tigner in 1942, and the pair determined to exploit her art to praise God.

 

She released a brace of trombone LPs under her married name - Some Golden Daybreak with organist Lorin Whitney (who a few years previously had released a Christian praise album which consisted of himself playing organ accompanied by song birds) and the inspiringly-titled Trombone for the Christian Faith label, but it seems that there's not a huge market for God-bothering trombonists. So she decided to sing instead.

 

Sadly, whenever the young Mrs Tigner opened up her larynx an odd, child-like sound came out (a female Lil’ Markie, if you will) and so, after issuing just one three-track EP for the obscure Angelus Records label, she learned to button it. That was until her husband had the brilliant idea of having his missus sing kiddie songs whilst pretending to be a small girl: Little Marcy was born.

 

Credited simply as Marcy, Mrs Tigner released a couple of albums on small Christian imprints, kicking off in 1964 with Happy Day Express which, along with her next few releases, deliberately did not feature a photo of the artist on the cover but instead included a rather crude drawing of a pig-tailed, smiley-faced moppet. The company that signed her (Cornerstone) seemed perfectly happy to share in this duplicity until a chance meeting with model, ventriloquist and former Miss America Vonda Van Dyke on the set of the Christian film Teenage Diary convinced her that having a wooden Mini-Me on her lap as she sang her stuff would be the way to go. So after careful study of the popular Paul Winchell book Ventriloquism For Fun and Profit (maybe he should consider retitling that For Fun and Prophet), she hooked up with a small doll – manufactured to her own design, and based on herself as a little girl, by the same company that made the original Charlie McCarthy doll – which she christened Little Marcy and, with the gift of her unusual, child-like singing voice, released around three dozen dopey, odd or downright disturbing albums over three decades.

 

They really have to be heard to be believed. Marcy’s voice is a dead ringer for that of a six year-old, and the songs – including such peaches as When Mr. Satan Knocks At My Heart's Door, I'm Glad I'm A Christian, I Love Little Pussy (a song guaranteed to give a psychiatrist nightmares), It’s Bubbling and the utterly brilliant Devil, Devil Go Away - are a mixture of kid-friendly, happy-clappy praise, nursery rhymes and less-friendly fire and brimstone scare tactics.

 

This unusual act fascinated and inspired audiences for decades. The pair appeared on radio programmes such as Marcy Tigner's Hymntime and Sing with Marcy; there's a TV special with Smokey the Bear (and, naturellement, an accompanying album and storybook), and at least two Little Marcy films.

 

Marcy also appeared in book form: between 1968 and 1980 Mrs Tigner penned a series of short children’s books including Little Marcy Loves Jesus, Little Marcy At The Zoo and Little Marcy’s Favourite Bible Stories. Our favourite block of wood even had its own line in prayer and hymn books. Marcy T teamed up with her daughter Lauri Khodabandehloo Tigner to write and perform, although these days Lauri Khodabandehloo has dropped the Tigner, become an author in her own right and has expunged all mentions of her past life as a doll’s assistant from her biography.

 

Marcy’s last album of new recordings, Little Marcy and Mother Goose Go to Church, came out in 1982; she appeared in a couple of short films made specifically for Christian cable channels by Tyndale Christian Video (Learning To Do God’s Work and Learning God’s Love) in 1988/89 and then gracefully retired.

 

Everett Tigner shuffled off this mortal coil in 2007, after 65 years of marriage. Little Marcy’s handler – Marcy Tigner – passed away at the grand old age of 90, in April 2012, which, barring a buy-out from the Disney Corporation, means that the world has probably heard the last of the little wooden doll.

Here are both sides of (to give it its full title) Ralph Carmichael Presents Little Marcy With the Jesus Story (a Children's Musical). Enjoy!

Download Side One HERE

 

Download Side Two HERE

The Eyes of Suzy Moppet

 

It’s been more than seven years since I last wrote about the career of the late Tammy Faye Bakker (born Tamara Faye LaValley in 1942), and when I did I concentrated on her career as a solo singer. But before she set out to be a solo sensation, she and her husband – the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker – began their recording career with the 1969 release Jim and Tammy and their Friends: Songs and Stories

 

The ‘friends’ included glove puppets Allie the Aligator, Muffin the Talking Dog, Mr Clown, Zippy the Talking Mailbox and the shrill-voiced Susie Moppet, who sounds for all the world like Little Marcy with a head cold. This couple had absolutely no shame: Susie Moppet is clearly a Porky Pig doll in a cheap dress and a wig made of yellow wool, but the money-grubbing Bakkers had the audacity to market Susie Moppet dolls as their own creation.

                                                             

At the time they recorded Jim and Tammy and their Friends: Songs and Stories the couple were broadcasting six days a week on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. The show was wildly popular (so they claim) and a Jim and Tammy Friendship Club was set up, giving the huckster couple their first real sense of how easy t was to fleece the gullible. Jim and Tammy (and their friends) became the breakout stars of Robertson’s channel and were soon following the trail of all of that filthy lucre: in 1973 the couple joined with disgraced televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch to help co-found the Trinity Broadcasting Network, before moving to Charlotte, North Carolina to set up their own money-making megalith. During that time Tammy issued her own solo debut, 1970’s Tammy Tammy Tammy, but building an empire had to come first, and she would not revisit her solo career until 1977.

 

In 1975, following the Bakker’s defection from the Trinity Broadcasting Network  to establish their own multi-million dollar generating Praise the Lord Network (PTL) Jim and Tammy and their Friends resurfaced, with their sophomore release, the idiotically-titled Oops! There Comes a Smile, the ‘friends’ first album for six years.

The same year as Oops! There Comes a Smile was issued the ‘difficult’ third album, Building on The Rock, also saw the light of day. Two years later saw the release of the band’s fourth and final album Clap Your Hands, before Tammy put the dolls back into the toy chest and resumed squawking for God without her hand up a puppet pig’s arse.

 

The Bakkers' control of PTL collapsed in 1987 when it was revealed that Jim had been a bit naughty with the company secretary, Jessica Hahn, and reportedly used $287,000 of the church’s funds to buy her silence (that was a waste of money!). Further investigations into the Bakker’s extravagant lifestyle questioned their dodgy, and vastly oversubscribed, Christian hotel time-share scheme and the funds they had poured into their Christian theme park, Heritage USA.

 

With the couple in disgrace and Jim facing a stretch in jail, renowned Christian fraudster, fellow televangelist and friend (not of the puppet kind, you understand) Jerry Falwell offered a lifeline, but under his stewardship PTL soon went bankrupt. In 1989 Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison on 24 fraud and conspiracy counts. Falwell and the Bakker’s fell out, primarily it seems because Falwell was only interested in using PTL to boost his own television career, but also no doubt because the equally self-absorbed Falwell had the temerity to call our Jim a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and ‘the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history’.

 

Jim and Tammy Taye divorced in 1992; a year later she married former PTL bigwig Roe Messner – the man who provided Jim with the cash to pay of Jessica Hahn and who claimed, during the bankruptcy hearing for PTL, to be owed $14 million by the church. Messner filed for bankruptcy himself in 1990 and, just like his former friend Jim, wound up being convicted of fraud. Tammy and Jerry both died in 2007. Sadly Jim is still with us (just: he had a stroke in May but was back at work fronting The Jim Bakker Show with second wife Lori in July), knocking out fake Covid cures and, as news site Christian Today put it, preying on ‘the most vulnerable kinds of people’.

 

Here is the entire Jim and Tammy and their Friends album, Oops! There Comes a Smile. The whole thing is only 25 minutes long, so I’ve simply broken it down to Side One (10 short songs: The Joy Of The Lord, What A Wonderful Day That Will Be, Oops! There Comes A Smile, Happiness Is The Lord, God Is Watching You, Do Lord, I Wonder, Heaven Is A Wonderful Place, Praise The Lord and God's Not Dead) and Side Two (two stories, The Pearl Of Great Price and Noah's Ark).

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Oops 1 HERE 

Download Oops 2 HERE 

 

Sonny, Buddy, Elmer and Dick

 If you were listening to the World’s Worst Records Radio Show this week, (and if you haven’t, you can do so now by clicking HERE) you would have heard me play a couple of tracks from one of my latest acquisitions, a Columbine Records song-poem compilation that was issued, it’s fairly safe to assume, in 1981.

It’s another one of the endless stream of the company’s catch-all Music of America series. There are well over 100 in all; no one has yet been able to fully catalogue them, although Phil Milstein’s long-dormant American Song-Poem Music Archives made a valiant effort some years ago: http://www.songpoemmusic.com/labels/columbin.htm

The cover – and I have several featuring an identical front sleeve – would lead you to believe that this dis was issued around 1976, in time to mark America’s bicentennial. In fact one of the songs on the album, U.S.A. (Garden of Roses) is bicentennial-themed, so how can I be so sure that the album was issued in 1981 when I’ve already admitted that no reliable catalogue exists? For the simple reason that one of the songs, To Yoko, was written about the assassination of John Lennon, which took place on 8 December 1980.

For sure, it could have come out in 1982 or 83, but there is no way that this album could possibly predate 1981. Unless the lyric for To Yoko had been composed by Criswell, that is. As a Beatle, Yoko and song-poem fan, finding and purchasing this album was essential. And it did not disappoint… as you are about to discover.

The tracks below feature Columbine regular Sonny Cash, who also appeared on the label as Ralph Lowe, as well as recording for MSR under the names of Dick Castle and Dick Kent. The singer’s real name was Elmer Plinger: no wonder he used a pseudonym. Plinger had been recording since at least 1940: in February of that year, as vocalist of the Modern Mountaineers, he recorded a couple of sides for RCA’s Bluebird imprint, which were also available via mail order retail pioneer Montgomery Ward. As Buddy Ray, he recorded a couple of vocals for the magnificently odd "Night-Club Music" Las Vegas & Country Western, by Ken ‘Nevada’ Maines, in the early 70s, and by the time these cuts were laid down in the studio he had been working as a professional vocalist for over 40 years.

Here’s Sonny/Elmer/Buddy/Dick with To Yoko and the rather wonderful Psychic Cigarette.

Enjoy!

Download Yoko HERE

 

 Download Cigarette HERE