{"id":752,"date":"2010-07-25T13:57:03","date_gmt":"2010-07-25T18:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/funky16corners.lunarpages.net\/?p=752"},"modified":"2012-08-03T16:12:46","modified_gmt":"2012-08-03T21:12:46","slug":"donnie-burks-the-gopher-funky-funky-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/?p=752","title":{"rendered":"Donnie Burks – The Gopher \/ Funky Funky Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

Listen\/Download – Donnie Burks – The Gopher <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Listen\/Download – Donnie Burks – Funky Funky Woman <\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Greetings all. <\/strong>
\nI come to you, secure in the refrigerated Funky16Corners Record Vault and Podcast Nerve Center, where I\u2019m currently hiding from the near 100 degree weather outside.
\nI\u2019ve spent the afternoon, digimatizing vinyl, ripping old CDs onto the new iPod and trying to refile records.
\nI was going to write about something else today, but I decided to do a little more research on that particular selection, so today\u2019s numbers moved to the front of the line.
\nI found this record last Record Store Day in Asbury Park, and despite the fact that the artist was unknown to me, I grabbed it as it was both cheap, and intriguing.
\nI\u2019d never heard of Donnie Burks<\/strong> before, but he looked vaguely familiar, and the record appeared to be American soul recorded (or at least released) in Europe, so I slapped a couple of semolians on the barrelhead and took the record home.
\nAs soon as I set to Googling, I discovered a couple of very interesting things.
\nDonnie Burks, though fairly obscure as a singer, had a multi-layered career in his lifetime, starting out as a college basketball star, and moving on to appear in movies and on the Broadway stage.
\nWhen he passed away in 2008 at the age of 66, his glory days were long behind him.
\nIt turns out that the reason he was familiar to me was that he had appeared as the grapes in a famous string of Fruit of the Loom underwear commercials (in which a group of dudes in fruit costumes touted the brand as a facsimile of the cornucopia in its logo).
\nBurks first came to prominence playing basketball for St John\u2019s University in the late 50s and early 60s. He went on to appear in movies (The Pawnbroker, Shaft, Without a Trace*) and TV, as well as in a number of Broadway musicals (Hair, the Tap Dance Kid).
\nI have no idea how he came to record the album that gives us today\u2019s track, but I have seen listings that suggest that he recorded at least two other 45s\u00a0 for the Decca and Metromedia labels.
\nThe tunes I bring you today, \u2018The Gopher\u2019 and \u2018Funky Funky Woman\u2019 come from the \u2018Swingin\u2019 Sounds of Soul\u2019 LP. \u2018The Gopher\u2019 a cool, uptempo soul dancer. The production isn\u2019t the best, but Burkes was a more than able singer and I\u2019d be interested to hear his other 45s.
\n\u2018Funky Funky Woman\u2019 carries the DNA of \u2018Funky Broadway\u2019, but it sounds as if it were strained through \u2018Boogaloo Down Broadway\u2019 first. Not terribly funky, but if I had a nickel for every record I\u2019ve seen with \u2018funky\u2019 in the title, that isn\u2019t (funky, that is), I\u2019d have a huge, shiny pile of nickels.
\nI\u2019d also love to know how Burks ended up recording (or at least releasing) an album in Germany. He was in the original Broadway cast of \u2018Hair\u2019 and the likely vintage of these recordings makes me wonder if he didn\u2019t record it while overseas with a touring cast of the show. If anyone knows, please drop me a line.
\nI hope you dig the tunes, and I\u2019ll see you all on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Peace<\/strong><\/p>\n

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


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

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

*He\u2019s a little hard to nail down via IMDB since he appears to be listed under a few different spellings of his name.<\/strong><\/p>\n


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

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

PS Head over to Iron Leg for a groovy instrumental<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donnie Burks Listen\/Download – Donnie Burks – The Gopher Listen\/Download – Donnie Burks – Funky Funky Woman   Greetings all. I come to you, secure in the refrigerated Funky16Corners Record Vault and Podcast Nerve Center, where I\u2019m currently hiding from the near 100 degree weather outside. I\u2019ve spent the afternoon, digimatizing vinyl, ripping old CDs […]<\/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":[46,14,30,12],"tags":[166,164],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digging","category-funky16corners","category-lp-tracks","category-soul","tag-funky16corners","tag-soul"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pMKgo-c8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","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=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3054,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions\/3054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funky16corners.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}