Bonus track: I Found My Love in Memphis

At our New Year's Day show at The Cove, we played precisely four covers: Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man," Micky and Sylvia's "Love is Strange," a David Wills song called "Barrooms to Bedrooms" which The Country Rockers used to do a beautiful version of, and this oddity.

I described the song and my discovery of it, and also put the lyrics and chord progression in this earlier post on The Grundies, for whom this was something of a signature tune. The one detail I left out of that post was the name of the producer responsible for the cache of weird records I found along with "I Found My Love in Memphis," mainly because I couldn't remember. My friend Doug Easley, with whom I had the pleasure of spending time before the gig, reminded me that it was one Style Wooten, who had a studio on Park Avenue in Memphis, and whom Doug had once met. (Doug also reminded me that the flipside of this George Clappes single was a terrible song called "The Sound of Wedding Bells," and that Memphis blues standard-bearer Don McMinn is rumored to have played on some of Style Wooten's records.) It seems as though not a lot else is known about Style Wooten, or what happened to him. Jim Spake, who played some wonderful sax with us, and whose voice can be heard off-camera here at the end, said he found a similar cache of Style Wooten records somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas - maybe he retired there.

We played this in our truncated third set on New Year's Day (truncated because almost everyone had gone home), and I forgot at the time to dedicate it to our friends Jack and Amy, who say this is their song. In this video, I am showing everyone else how this very peculiar song goes, or at least the way the Grundies played it. We were never that sure from listening to the record because the bass player seemed to be playing it for the first time when they cut it. All very strange, but oddly appealing.