A Crop of Crap From Columbine

It's been a little quiet around here of late, hasn't it? Well, let's make up for that right this very now, with the first of a bunch of stiffs from the ever-popular Columbine label of Hollywood, one of the greatest - and most prolific - song-poem outfits of all time.

Best known for the hundreds of compilations issued in the 70s and 80s, under such titles as the Now Sounds of Today, Music of America, New Favorites Of…, Gospel Jubilee and so on, for the next couple of posts on the blog I'm going to be concentrating on their 45 and EP output, a series of releases less well documented, but which also adds up to hundreds of discs.

First up we have all four tracks from a Columbine EP issued in 1977, with two songs each from Kay Weaver and the redoubtable Ralph Lowe. 

The first cut, the opening track of the EP if you will, is the fairly forgettable You're My Spark, composed by John P. Kane, and performed in her usual disinterested style by Kay Weaver. The song, copyrighted in October 1977, is dull, and Weaver's performance lacks any of the 'spark' that the title infers. Kay Weaver had a secondary career as a performer of religious music, and her bland country-western rambles might work quite well in that genre, but for me she only really gets going as a song-poem stylist when offered rockier tunes to torture.

Next up is Ralph Lowe, and My Love Is Going Away, composed by the colourfully-monikered Alvaro de Jesus Buenfil. Copyright in this 'classic' was registered in November 1977, and Alvaro had already submitted other songs to Columbine for their careful consideration: Lowe performed his classic In The Way of Dancin' on one of the company's Music of America collections. Confusingly the title of the song does not appear in the lyric at all.

Flip the disc over and we're back with Kay Weaver and Dola Lindsay's When Our Song Starts To Play. Dola Lindsay came from Port Orchard, Washington and, like our friend Alvaro, had also contributed other songs to Columbine: her composition Shadow of Your Heart appears on the seventeenth iteration of the New Favorites of Kay Weaver series.    

The final track on the disc is the real highlight. From erstwhile lyric writer Glenn Aldrich comes the harrowing My Darling's Grave. Like John Kane, Glenn registered copyright for the song, words and music no less, in October 1977, and this performance, by song-poem titan Ralph Lowe, is simply wonderful. Glenn's lyric is rendered utterly devoid of emotion, and Ralph's doleful delivery is driven by boredom, not sentiment, plodding along like a carthorse rather than a funeral cortege.  

Enjoy!

Download Spark HERE

Download Love HERE

Download Song HERE 

Download Grave HERE