The World's Worst Records: Christmas cavalcade 2023

Sunday 24 December 2023

Christmas cavalcade 2023 - Part Three

Well, with just a day to go before we all get to fill our faces with turkey (or whatever your chosen alternative might be), there’s just enough time for one last installment in this year’s Christmas cavalcade.

If you were listening to the festive edition of the World’s Worst Records Radio Show earlier this week, you would have heard me playing snippets from a cute 1960s kid’s Christmas tale, Shirley Higginson’s The Lisping Elf. Well, here’s the whole thing for you to do with as you will.

The Lisping Elf was issued at least twice -once in the early 1960s on Corpat Records (my copy, picked up in an antiques centre in Exeter, comes from this original pressing) and again, during the second half of the 1970s, by LEI records. The charming music (which always reminds me of the kind of thing you would hear during BBC schools’ broadcasts during the 1970s) was composed by Tommy Banks (a.k.a. the Reverend Thomas Banks) one half of the Canadian folk duo Tom and Judy. Ms. Higginson was an author – based in Edmonton I believe - who specialised in fables for children: her other works include Ralph the Flying Dog and Ice Cream Sneakers.

Next is a recent (like, this morning) YouTube find courtesy of the always excellent Thrift Store Vinyl channel. Issued in 1974, here from Austin, Texas are the Wilson family (well, the Wilson kids at least) ‘singing’ Santa’s Surprise.

Composed by Dick Culp and Billy E. Nix (guitar player, songwriter and owner of Ben Records), the Wilson family would issue at least one further record on Darva, the 1976 single Candy Cane Castle, backed with Running Through The Sunshine.

And finally, for this year anyway, here’s a song-poem oddity from Gene Merlino. Professional vocalist Merlino did most of his song poem work for two labels, Preview (as Gene Marshall) and Columbine (as John Muir), but also recorded for a number of other companies under a variety of different names.

Some time back, obscure music collector Sammy Reed unearthed a 45 on the George Liberace Songsmiths label (Lee’s violin-scratching brother had his own publishing company, which also dabbled in the song-poem world), the rather fun and jaunty Santa’s Mommy Must Have Had Quintuplets, and although the vocalist is not credited on the disc itself (the only credit is for the lyric’s author, Clate Hazelwood), the singer is unquestionably Merlino.