In 1987, my dad, who worked at a southern-gospel radio station, brought home a box of 7-in. records, mostly 45's, sitting at a shelf in the production room, "rejects" that the station didn't play.
One of the records had one Jesus-related song, which is why I guess it got mailed off to the station. The labels on this record were all black, with white lettering listing the names of the songs, and peoples' name and address under each title. And the company name on top in big capital letters - "HALMARK", with "Sound of Excellence" in smaller letters under that. Now, there are things that are obvious now, after some 38 years, but at the time, 18-year-old me had no idea what the heck to think of this.
Then I heard one of the songs, named "China Dolly". The least I can say is that it was very intriguing. Let me look through "The Wonderful and the Obscure" to find a Halmark record that has the same music track it had.
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Good, here's one. "Her Kind".
As I recall, it was a duet with Mary and a different male singer who had this sortof "soul"-type voice. But anyway, much like what I read about people who sang on Halmark records, they indeed sound like they were ad-lib "singing along" with the words. One of my brothers said it sounded like they were making the song up as they went along. Try as other records might as they passed my ears, I still call it the worst song ever recorded.
I would love to have that record again, but in 2002 - >ulp< - a very close friend, there we go, thought they had no more use for it, and threw it away. This is how dumb my stupid friend was. He did keep a copy of the song in one form or other until the 2012 "purge".
To add - heck, forget salt, how about vinegar - to the wound, it was only maybe a couple of months later when I found that ASPMA site, where I learned about song-poems. And I used up enough space already, so I'll skip to where I looked up that "discography" page and found out that Halmark was indeed a song-poem label.
So that Halmark record with "China Dolly" was my first song-poem record. I can not make myself forget how that went. I can remember everything of how that rendition sounded.
Fast-forward - heck, "hyperspace" is more like it - to maybe a week ago. I decided to look up Discogs to see if "China Dolly" could be there. The Halmark record wasn't there, but I found out that, of all people, Gary Roberts did a version of it. And the writer's name was very familiar with me because of all the times I saw it on that Halmark label - Gerald Momy. Doggonit, there weren't any copies for sale, so I couldn't get that.
But then I saw a 45 listed by another singer that had "China Dolly" as side B. And someone had it for sale, so I snatched it up. "China Dolly" was on my first song-poem record, and on my latest one.
And buddies, look who actually did his version of it.
From what I vividly remember of that Halmark version, this was up there on the scale of a difficult set of lyrics to navigate. Much like Gene was able to improve on "Beautiful Joyce", let's hear how he does with this.
China Dolly - Gene Marshall Download
There are no "I love you"s here! I guess Gerald took those out when he sent the lyrics to Preview, because the Halmark version had a lot of them. Anyway, it turns out I didn't remember all of that song. Some of the words I heard here reminded me of parts I forgot. As for Gene, what can I say? He did what he could with what he was given. They should've started fading out at about 2 1/2 minutes, all that stuff didn't have to be sung again (the Halmark version didn't do that), and for gosh sake, that jazzy part at the end with Gene's trademark "Yeah!" at the end should not have been done. The one thing both versions have that is glaringly wrong is - "The land of the rising sun" is Japan, not China!
Anyway, The question hanging over my head is, how did that Gary Roberts version do?
