I finally got to around to Charles Williams' Uncle Sagamore
in my TBR pile. I enjoyed it every bit as much as Diamond
Bikini, but it is a bit of a Shaggy Dog story--one in which
you know the end, but you don't how Uncle Sagamore is going
to pull it off. The front and back covers promise a much
sexier tale than Williams delivers. The tagline on the back
reads
"Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women--all supplied by
Uncle Sagamore," which is an allusion to Red Ingle's
hillbilly spoof "Cigareets, Whusky and Wild Wild Women," an
old Capitol 78 released in the late 1940s.
So . . . thinking it would make for a good soundtrack to the
novel, I dug out the record and played it and the end of the
record reminded me of a story I remember from my youth about
what was supposedly the origin of the cliché ¯f drunks
requesting Melancholy Baby. On the record a drunk keeps
demanding the song Temptation and finally Red says, "I'm
sorry we don't play that kind of music here."
When I was a kid there was an often-told story that, like
Oscar Wilde's
"Don't Shoot the Player" anecdote, was supposedly
representative of American society's lack of culture and I
was wondering if anyone else on the list had heard the story
and maybe had more details.
The story goes that a famous European opera singer was
touring the U.S. in the early part of the last century
singing famous arias. At one particular concert, a drunk kept
demanding she sing "Melancholy Baby". Finally she got so
exasperated that she stopped the show and told the drunk,
"Sir, I'm afraid we don't play that kind of music here," to
which he responded, "Then show us your tits!"
Jeff
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