Sunday, November 26, 2006

Johnny Standley, "It's in the Book (Parts 1 & 2)"
(November 22, 1952)

For all the sub-Adornian boilerplate you hear about the disposibility of pop culture, it's actually rare to come across anything in pop culture that's left as few traces as Johnny Standley. Rock history has found "uses" for pre-rock performers such as Nat 'King' Cole and Les Paul and Johnnie Ray. Anton Karas, even if he never had another hit, is at least attached to one of the most beloved films of all time. Leroy Anderson, Eileen Barton, and Eddy Howard -- each of them have a presence on the web beyond all those verminous lyric sites. Johnny Standley's just gone. Maybe you can find more of substance than I can on the subject, but as far as I can see, there's few stray facts, no bio, not even a photo of the man online. If it wasn't for one of Whitburn's book's, I wouldn't have known he wasn't still alive. (He died in 1992, age 79.)

Standley's vanishing makes a kind of sense as his sole hit doesn't fit very well in the modern world. It's old, for one -- pre-MTV, pre-Beatles, pre-Elvis -- but even worse, as a half music-free mock-sermon on "Little Bo-Peep" and half absurdist singalong about lye soap, it's a novelty song. Novelty songs usually lead a wretched cultural existence: if you can't play it at a wedding or during Christmas or on Radio Disney, all you've got left is the Dr. Demento show. Can't really play this one on pop radio, 'cause the talky bits would likely confuse radio listeners and singalong sounds sooo corny, and the only songs you could segue in or out of it are other novelty songs. Can't sell stuff with it, except maybe lye soap.

But, still...it's left traces. It plays in the final scene of The Last Picture Show, mocking and celebrating Sony and Ruth's reconcilliation. And while I never heard this thing until the Napster age (can't remember why I downloaded it), it did leave its mark on me without realizing. One time my sixth grade teachers were auditioning students for speaking parts in my elementary school's graduation ceremony, and when I got up, a series of riffs on the absurdity of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" came out of my mouth seemingly ab nihilo. It got a lot of laughs from both my peers and teachers, a mighty big ego boost until I realized some time afterwards that I had completely ripped off a comedian I had seen on one of HBO's comedy specials. (Who it was, I don't remember, and I'll probably never find out unless HBO dumps its vault-jizz all over YouTube. Whoever it was, it's not inconcievable that he himself unconsciously ripped off the general idea from Standley, perhaps figuring nobody remembered any more.)

So the first part, the sermon part, gives me a cringe of recognition every time. Using the delivery and exposition style of a preacher, Standley ponders the turns of phrase in "Little Bo-Peep": that if you say Little Bo-Peep lost her sheep, then it's superfluous to add that she doesn't know where to find them; if she doesn't know where to find them, it's pointless to tell her to leave the sheep alone; and of course they're going to come home wagging their tails behind them -- what else are they gonna wag? It's dismaying to think that I once found this kind of bewitchment-by-language funny, or that I was so keen to declare my status as a not-child by uncovering THE TOTAL ABSURDITY of a poor little nursery rhyme. And beyond all personal associations, his delivery is painful, all cold-blooded comedian's instinct. He sounds less like Billy Sunday than he does, I dunno, T.S. Eliot or some other drippy patrician, all vibrato and pitch shifts and VOLUME and rolling consonants that sound like sheep baahhs which I don't think are even intentional. And when there are dead spaces in the monolgue, Standley tries to sustain his laughs by repeating a phrase dumbly, or using his ready-made catchphrase "it's in the book!" And when that doesn't work, the friendly (but not very subtle) tape-splicing man comes in to save the day. It's stupid. It's putrid. It's embarrassing. I can't listen to it without pondering the enormous distance between myself and the people who found this funny 54 years ago, without pondering why such an enormous gap should even exist when other mass-culture things as old or older still reach me.

Then he sings. The subject of this mock-sacred song is grandma's lye soap, and as such has nothing to do with what came before it except for the maybe non-trivial fact that both of them draw upon "the past" (childhood, ye olden ways of gramma) for their humor. (In fact the "Grandma's Lye Soap" song is anti-nostalgiac in the sense that it reveals the lye soap as not quaint but useless and even dangerous -- it permanently deafens two kids). The voice isn't Billy Sunday, isn't T.S. Eliot, but maybe the fire chief of Muncie, Indiana circa 1910 as he tries to sing "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean" -- except, you know, it's Hollywood, it's vaudeville, a comedy take on earnestness. Standley walks to the chorus with a growing vehemence, and when he gets there, his voice is bright and harsh: he whoops and hollers, and the audience whoops and hollers back. He stops it dead, though the audience continues to clap a little longer. He goes through the same cycle twice over: a little T.S. Eliot, a little Muncie, and than a polite raunch up hillbilly-style, with words like "ohhh" and "plaaace" bent into thrilling rainbow arcs.

It is magnificent. After that dumbass nursery rhyme schtick, it has no right to be, but it is. This isn't Brother Claude Ely but it's far, far closer than somebody topping the charts in the great repressed sobersides nation circa 1952 of my imagination should get, and definitely close enough to wonder why it doesn't seem worthy of much comment, if the internet is any indication. And yet it's still, clearly, a mockery. Even if its mockery is ultimately inoffensive, I can't think of any other popular hit that sends up organized religion as thoroughly as this does, yet as ridiculous as this sounds, you have to wait until rock & roll to get anything that smacks of churchy hysteria as much as...this...this COMEDY record does. Maybe just enough people found the idea of a comedy sermon offensive enough to doom its future as an oldies staple -- doom it so thoroughly that nobody can remember the record or the offense. A pity.

It gets a 1 for Part 1 and a 9 for Part 2, so a generous 6 overall.

(link)