Music: May 2006 Archives

This Friday and Saturday, June 2 and 3, the Tulsa Boy Singers will perform their spring concert. The program includes classical selections, such as Mozart's Laudate Dominum, and more modern pieces, including several songs from the musical Camelot.

The concert on both nights begins at 7:30, at Trinity Episcopal Church, 501 S. Cincinnati, in downtown Tulsa. Admission is FREE, but donations are gratefully accepted, and CDs of the Tulsa Boy Singers will be on sale.

My son started singing with the group in the fall, and he has enjoyed it completely. It has been a great learning experience for him, not only for vocal skill and musical knowledge, but for self-discipline.

TBS always puts on a great concert -- it's well worth your time this Friday and Saturday evening.

Our church sponsors a chapter of Reformed University Fellowship at the University of Tulsa, and as a result we've had an influx of college age, young singles, and young married couples into our congregation. (RUF is the collegiate ministry of the Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative evangelical denomination.)

Along with the new people, the RUF connection has brought new songs into our worship service, or, more accurately, new tunes to old hymns by writers like Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, John Newton, and Augustus Toplady.

The tunes can be found in the RUF Hymnbook. The RUF Hymnbook Online Hymn Resource provides PDF lead sheets, guitar chord sheets, lyric-only sheets (for overhead projectors), and brief demos (usually a verse and a chorus) in MP3 format.

Kevin Twit is the composer of many of the new tunes, and the RUF Hymnbook Online Hymn Resource is a part of his website, Indelible Grace Music. Twit has a blog on the site as well, and one of his recent entries is "Thoughts on writing a new tune for a hymn text."

This has nothing to do with a Grove, Oklahoma, legislator's plan to get $30 million in state tax credits to redo Shangri-La resort on Grand Lake.

Mary Weiss, lead singer with the '60s girl group group that just coincidentally happened to be entirely staffed by the distaff (don't say "girl group" around Mary) the Shangri-Las, has signed with Norton Records for her first solo album.

Norton's website has a lengthy and fascinating interview with Mary Weiss, who talks about their hits (e.g, Leader of the Pack), recording sessions, the rigors of touring, their fellow musicians (like James Brown and the Zombies), going from obscurity to sudden fame, and how it all dissolved in a mess of lawsuits. Start with that link and follow the links at the bottom of each page to read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Dustbury's 3WC linkblog.)

I am definitely not talking about Tulsa's sales tax vote.

This Tuesday, Merle Haggard's 1971 album, A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (Or, My Salute to Bob Wills), is being re-released on CD, in tandem with his 1976 release It's All in the Movies.

Haggard's tribute to Wills is credited with a revival of interest in Western Swing music, and it marked the first reunion of Wills sidemen from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, a chance to hear these virtuosi on modern recording equipment. This album includes Johnnie Lee Wills on banjo, Eldon Shamblin on electric guitar, Johnny Gimble and Joe Holley on fiddle, Alex Brashear on trumpet, and Tiny Moore on the "biggest little instrument in the world" (mandolin -- amplified, of course). The success of this album paved the way for the recording of the legendary For the Last Time album two years later.

Last week, I checked out the library's copy of the earlier CD release, and if you'd been in our house late Friday night, you would have heard me singing along (a bit too loudly), as I worked on finishing the transfer of BatesLine to a new server.

One thing sadly missing from the library's copy were the liner notes by country music historian Rich Kienzle. Kienzle's notes are always interesting reading -- another good reason to pick up a copy of the upcoming re-release.