{"id":682,"date":"2010-06-29T19:56:46","date_gmt":"2010-06-30T00:56:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/funky16corners.lunarpages.net\/?p=682"},"modified":"2015-02-04T14:02:55","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T19:02:55","slug":"dolly-parton-busy-signal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/?p=682","title":{"rendered":"Dolly Parton – Busy Signal"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>\"Example\"<\/strong>
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\nDolly Parton and her hair…<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Listen\/Download – Dolly Parton – Busy Signal <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Greetings all. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I hope you’re all having a good week, and that you’ve taken the time to check out Tony C’s <\/strong>F16C Soul Club mix, on account of it’s a banger.
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I think it\u2019s safe to assume that many of you are already scraping your jaws off of the floor, having read the name of today\u2019s artist, Dolly Parton.<\/strong>
\nAllow me to \u2018splain\u2026<\/em>
\n[clich\u00e9] The 60s were a turbulent time [\/clich\u00e9].<\/strong>
\nThe above statement is true on many levels, and aside from the politics and social upheaval, musically things were going nuts. Take a look at a random Top 40 chart from any week between 1964 and 1968 and you are in for some real surprises.
\nThe pop music scene of the mid 60s was incredibly diverse (maybe more diverse than at any other time) and within that diversity, where Frank Sinatra <\/strong>and Ed Ames<\/strong> bumped up against the Turtles <\/strong>and the Buffalo Springfield<\/strong>, there formed a vast, diffuse crucible of sorts where all of those crazy threads were – on occasion – woven together in very unusual ways.
\nPart of this weaving was deliberate, wherein some enterprising soul, perhaps used to doing things one way, decided to take a shot at another part of the market.
\nIt was just such a shot that made today\u2019s selection.
\nI can\u2019t recall exactly where I first heard Dolly Parton\u2019s \u2018Busy Signal\u2019, but I do remember being knocked flat on my ass when I did.
\nI doubt there are many among you who don\u2019t already know who Miss Parton is, but I also doubt there are more than a few of you who had any idea that her discography harbored anything this interesting (outside of a country music context, natch\u2026).
\nThe world of \u2018blue-eyed soul\u2019 (which is kind of a bullshit term, since if a record is soulful there really ought not be a need to make note of the race of the performer, and yes I know I’ve used it here but when I get some extra time I’ll cook up something more appropriate, and yes your suggestions are welcome…) is generally the province of performers who were mainly, or at least peripherally performers of music in a soul, funk or R&B style. When you listen to folks like Billy Harner, Mitch Ryder, Steve Colt <\/strong>etc, what you hear is an artist devoted to recreating the sound of black music.
\nWhen you take a look at the long and distinguished discography of Dolly Parton, you generally see something else, that being a country singer.
\nI have no idea how she came to record \u2018Busy Signal\u2019, but the other name on the label, composer and producer Ray Stevens<\/strong> give us a clue or two.
\nStevens, who had his first pop hit in 1962 with \u2019Ahab the Arab\u2019 (his forte was novelty records) and his last in 1975 with \u2019Misty\u2019 was, in addition to his own recording career, a busy songwriter, producer and session musician on the Nashville scene of the 1960s. He recorded with Brenda Lee, Brook Benton, the Blue Things, BJ Thomas<\/strong> and countless others in his many capacities.
\nThe records he worked on, as well as his own recordings indicate that he was able to tap into a wide variety of styles, from rock\u2019n\u2019roll, to country, to pop.
\n\u2018Busy Signal\u2019 is a perfect example of the fact that he was also conversant in soul.
\nThe record opens – not surprisingly – the sound of a busy signal, created with human voices. Dolly drops in with the initial statement of the lyric, followed by a wonderful shift marked with the sound of a snare drum and a chorus of backing singers. While her voice is readily recognizable, the style she uses here travels in that grey area where girl group sounds cross over into soul, which of course could lead into another discussion of country music as “soul” music of another kind, and all the various and sundry intersections of the two, usually racially segregated styles in the actually segregated south. There\u2019s certainly a book or two that could be written about the way white and black artists were exchanging (actively and passively) musical ideas and the countless amazing records that came out of that bubbling stew pot.
\n\u2018Busy Signal\u2019 was released late in 1965, and as far as I can tell met with little success (though the flip side is fairly traditional, mid-60s Nashville country). Whether Steven’s was deliberately attempting a soul record, or just happened to toss the right ingredients into the pot at random, the world may never know.
\nNaturally, as if often the case with unusual, soulful records bouncing around the periphery of soul itself, \u2018Busy Signal\u2019 enjoys a certain level of popularity with the Northern Soul crowd over in the UK. It\u2019s a record that can get fairly expensive, and one I chased for a long time (and was outbid on more than once). I can\u2019t help but sense an element of kismet in the fact that when I did finally get myself a copy I grabbed it for less than three flimsy US dollars (my hands shaking pretty much from the time I won it to the moment my trusty mail carrier brought it to the house). It only got here this week, but I felt I had to move it right to the front of the queue. I hope you dig it as much as I do.
\nPeace<\/strong><\/p>\n

Larry<\/strong><\/p>\n


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<\/strong>\"Example\"<\/strong><\/p>\n


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Check out the Funky16Corners Store at Cafe Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

PS Head over to Iron Leg for some mid 60s pop<\/a>
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dolly Parton and her hair… Listen\/Download – Dolly Parton – Busy Signal Greetings all. I hope you’re all having a good week, and that you’ve taken the time to check out Tony C’s F16C Soul Club mix, on account of it’s a banger. I think it\u2019s safe to assume that many of you are already […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[37,14,24,12,18],"tags":[166,169,164],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blue-eyed-soul","category-funky16corners","category-northern-soul","category-soul","category-soul-45","tag-funky16corners","tag-northern-soul","tag-soul"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pMKgo-b0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5472,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/5472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}