Fess Parker gone at 85

[DanielJones]

Another 50's era hero has passed on today.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35935201/ns/entertainment-television/

I suppose that he makes number three. Sad day indeed.

Cheers.

Dan

 

[Atterbury Dodd]

Oh rats. I grew up watching Davy Crockett. As far as I knew Fess Parker was Davy.

 

[Hondo]

The Ballad od Davey Crockett

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
The greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three
Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier

Fought single-handed through many a war
Till the enemy was whipped and peace was in store
And while he was handlin' this risky chore
He made himself a legend forever more
Davy, Davy Crockett, the man who knew no fear

He went off to Congress and served a spell
Fixin' up the Government and the laws as well
Took over Washington, so I heard tell
And he patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell
Davy, Davy Crockett, seeing his duty clear

When he came home his politic'ing was done
And the western march had just begun
So he packed his gear and his trusty gun
And lit out a-grinnin' to follow the sun
Davy, Davy Crockett, leading the pioneer

RIP Fess Parker

 

[Hondo]

Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
With an eye like an eagle
And as tall as a mountain was he!

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
He was brave, he was fearless
And as tough as a mighty oak tree!

From the coonskin cap on the top of ol' Dan
To the heel of his rawhide shoe;
The rippin'est, roarin'est, fightin'est man
The frontier ever knew!

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all Americans free!

What a Boone! What a doer!
What a dream come-er-true-er was he!

Daniel Boone was a man!
Yes, a big man!
With a whoop and a holler
he c'd mow down a forest of trees!

Daniel Boone was a man!
Yes, a big man!
If he frowned at a river
In July all the water would freeze!

But a peaceable, pioneer fella was Dan
When he smiled all the ice would thaw!
The singin'est, laughin'est, happiest man
The frontier ever saw!

Daniel Boone was a man!
Yes, a big man!
With a dream of a country that'd
Always forever be free!

What a Boone! What a do-er!
What a dream-come-er-true-er was he!

RIP Fess Parker

 

[LocktownDog]

I watched reruns for half my childhood. Wore a coonskin cap for so long that my dad finally threw it away.

Fess Parker was one of those guys who wasn't just an actor, he was a hell of a man outside the business too. A couple of years ago in an interview, he said that his shows (or any like them) would never be allowed on tv now ... that our culture has gone too far downhill to accept them. He was right.

RIP

 

[Hondo]

I watched reruns for half my childhood. Wore a coonskin cap for so long that my dad finally threw it away.

Fess Parker was one of those guys who wasn't just an actor, he was a hell of a man outside the business too. A couple of years ago in an interview, he said that his shows (or any like them) would never be allowed on tv now ... that our culture has gone too far downhill to accept them. He was right.

RIP

Well said, one of the fondest years of my youth Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Bonanza, and Walt Disney years, don't make shows like these any more, pity.
Fess Parker was and will always be a great man.

 

[Brian Sheridan]

Never really care for the rustic shows...but I did always find it funny when Johnny Carson accidentally called him "Pess Farker."

 

[cookie]

Blog Piece on the above by Mark Steyn

Song of the Week #162
"The Ballad Of Davy Crockett" by George Bruns and Tom W Blackburn
"The Letter" by Wayne Carson Thompson

This is one of those occasional Song of the Week medleys prompted by the whimsical fellowship of the obituary column. Other than that they both died last week, Fess Parker and Alex Chilton don't have a lot in common. One was a good decade and a half past his three score and ten; the other was a middle-aged man felled by a heart attack. One enjoyed phenomenal fame and, when that faded, parlayed it into great business success; the other had a huge commercial hit in early life and, when that faded, enjoyed an ever greater cult following that never quite manifested itself in his checking account. Between them, they led to two Number One records, barely more than a decade apart but which nevertheless seem to sit on either side of the great divide in American life.

Let's start with a phenomenon - one of those rare cultural markers that delineates precisely a moment in history. It's America in the mid-Fifties, and across the land there are millions of young boys - and girls - running around suburban cul-de-sacs in imitation coonskin caps. But look across the Atlantic: The raccoon is all but unknown to Britons, yet across the country it's the same thing - in leafy villages and the backstreets of grimy industrial towns, children sport coonskin caps. They turn up in the otherwise very English adventures of the schoolboy Molesworth. And the man who popularized the headgear inspired a thousand schoolboy jokes, too:

Q: How many ears does Davy Crockett have?

A: Three. A left ear, a right ear, and a wild front ear.

And, whichever side of the ocean you were on, if you were a slip of a lad 55 years ago, you still know every word of the accompanying song. Well, the first couple of verses anyway:

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so he knew ev'ry tree
Killed him a b'ar when he was only three
Davy!
Davy Crockett!
King of the wild frontier!

It was born on December 15th 1954 when Walt Disney's TV show on ABC presented "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter", the first of what would eventually become five hour-long episodes featuring the eponymous frontiersman. To play Crockett, Disney signed a struggling actor pushing thirty and with not a lot on his resumé other than the national tour of the Broadway hit Mister Roberts and a couple of minor film roles. One of them was a bit of B-movie sci-fi called Them!, which Walt Disney ordered a screening of because someone thought James Arness would make a good Davy Crockett. Instead, it was a boyish, lanky, 6' 6" Fess Parker that caught Uncle Walt's eye. Parker said yes, and "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter" made stars of both him and Crockett. Disney had always been very canny about music and its usefulness to the overall project, and for "Crockett" he commissioned a song. Verse after verse after verse ensured that, if you only had a hazy grasp of Davy's bio before the number, you pretty much knew everything that mattered by the end:

In eighteen-thirteen the Creeks uprose
Addin' redskin arrows to the country's woes
Now Injun fightin' is somethin' he knows
So he shoulders his rifle an' off he goes
Davy!
Davy Crockett!
The man who don't know fear!

Every kid under 15 could sing that refrain. "Davy Crockett" was not just a ratings sensation but a merchandising one: coloring books, T-shirts, bedspreads and bath towels, toy "Old Betsy" rifles, buckskin shirts and, of course, coonskin caps - an estimated ten million of them."We had no idea what was going to happen," Walt said years later. "Why, by the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo."

But why let untimely death ruin a great marketing opportunity? Disney rushed a pair of prequels into production, and then turned the five hours into two feature films. On a nationwide public appearance tour, Fess Parker was greeted by crowds up to 20,000 strong.

The song was the work of George Bruns and lyricist Tom W Blackburn. Bruns was a Disney house composer who went on to write Herbie the Love Bug's insinuating theme, scored the Jungle Book film, and contributed the "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life For Me)" song to the "Pirates Of The Caribbean" theme park ride. Blackburn was a western novelist and screenwriter who adapted the Crockett legend for Disney. On the song, their burdens were not equal. Bruns wrote 16 bars of music, and Blackburn had to write a thousand and one verses to them:

Off through the woods he's a marchin' along
Makin' up yarns an' a singin' a song
Itchin' fer fightin' an' rightin' a wrong
He's ringy as a b'ar an' twice as strong
Davy!
Davy Crockett!
The buckskin buccaneer!

Bill Hayes made the first record, and then a couple of weeks later Tennessee Ernie Ford cut a track. Hayes got to Number One exactly 55 years ago, the end of March 1955. Tennessee Ernie Ford's version reached Number Five, and Fess Parker's own recording was hard on its heels at Number Six. When the film was released in Britain in 1956, Dick James recorded "Davy" with another kids' TV theme on the flip side, "Robin Hood", written by Carl Sigman, the lyricist of "A Marshmallow World". In Norway, Arne Bendiksen had the hit (highly recommended); in Finland, Kauko Käyhkö. The song sold as many copies as the coonskip cap - over ten million. Perhaps the unlikeliest recording came a decade later, by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

It was Fess Parker's version they used in Back To The Future. The film is set in 1955, the year of the Crockett craze, so naturally there are coonskin caps and Parker's theme song on the jukebox. By then - the Eighties - he was a long way from his TV celebrity. In the Sixties, he'd wanted to revive Davy Crockett in a weekly series, but, even though the character is in public domain and Disney held no rights to him, Lloyds of London declined to insure Parker against a possible law suit by the Mouse. So Fess switched to Daniel Boone - hey, one frontiersman is as good as any other, right? - and got six years of network TV out of him. Thereafter, he settled down to a highly lucrative second career as a Santa Barbara real estate developer and winery owner. If "king of the wild frontier" to owner of Fess Parker's Wine Country Inn & Spa sounds like some kind of shorthand for the republic's evolution, consider this. When the song is performed by various animatronic attractions at Disney's theme parks, they no longer sing:

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so he knew ev'ry tree
Killed him a b'ar when he was only three....

Now it's "tamed him a b'ar when he was only three". Evidently, the original lyric is too strong meat for the children and grandchildren of the boomers who bellowed along enthusiastically only the day before yesterday. We wouldn't want to distress the poor dearies, and have to increase the School Board's trauma counseling budget.

Alex Chilton was a bona fide member of the coonskin cap generation - born in 1950, not on a mountain top in Tennessee, but in Memphis, which is close enough. And, if he never killed him a b'ar when he was only three, he scored him a Number One record when he was only 16. He was the youngest member of a group called the Box Tops, and in the end the only one that mattered. A Memphis studio owner and aspiring record producer had been trying to work together to no great success. Deciding they'd be better off working separately, the owner, Chips Moman, gave the producer, Dan Penn, the name of a local group, and a demo tape by Wayne Carson Thompson of his own songs. Penn called in the group, and told them to pick out anything on the tape they wanted to sing, but to be sure to include something called "The Letter", which Penn regarded as the only really top-rank song.

Who's Wayne Carson Thompson? He's a solid professional songwriter who's had some big hits ("Always On My Mind") and some inspired titles ("Barstool Mountain", "She's Actin' Single, I'm Drinkin' Doubles"). One day his dad came to him with a lyric line. "He would come up with ideas," recalled Thompson, "and pass them on to me, and say, 'If you can do anything with this, then go ahead.'" This particular day he had a phrase,:

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane....

And that was all. His son thought about it for awhile, and then wrote the rest:

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain't got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone, I'm a-goin' home
My baby wrote me a letter
I don't care how much money I gotta spend
Got to get back to my baby again
Lonely days are gone, I'm a-goin' home
My baby wrote me a letter.
Well, she wrote me a letter
Said she couldn't live without me no more.
Listen, mister, can't you see I got to get back
To my baby once a-more
Anyway....

It's in traditional A-A-B-A form - main theme, repeated, middle section, back to main theme - and it's a song of urgency, like "Darktown Strutters' Ball" in the teens or "Lulu's Back In Town" in the Thirties, but with a jet-age twist. In the studio, the no-name local group did over 30 takes before Dan Penn was satisfied. The producer was preoccupied with the band and adding a plane sound-effect that he dubbed off in the office from an LP. So he didn't pay too much attention to the singer, other than to tell him to stress the three syllables of "aer-o-plane". Wayne Carson Thompson was in the studio, playing guitar on the session, but wasn't too impressed. He didn't like the arrangement. He didn't like young Alex Chilton's vocal - "the boy didn't sing high enough" - and he didn't think there was enough of a record: the whole thing came in at one minute 52 seconds. Then Dan Penn added the jet sound-effect "and I thought he'd lost his mind," said Thompson.

At the end, Penn told the group to come up with a name for themselves. "Well," said one of them, "let's have a contest and everybody can send in 50 cents and a box top." Penn looked at Thompson. "The Box Tops. That'll do." Thompson still didn't like the vocal or the arrangement or the jet or the 1-52 length, so he went off on a USO tour for six weeks. When he returned, the record was Number Four. Next week - September 22nd 1967 - it was Number One, where it stayed for a month before being knocked off by Lulu and "To Sir With Love", written by one of the guests on this year's Mark Steyn Christmas Show, Don Black. Because it's in traditional form with a strong central idea, all kinds of singers picked up on the song from Bobby Darin and Dionne Warwick to the Beach Boys and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. In 1969, the Arbors got to Number 20 with a softer, slower, easy listening version that somehow misses the entire I-got-a-plane-to-catch premise. The following year, Joe Cocker put a bit more life back into the song, and took it back into the charts for the third time in four years. But the Box Tops' is still the version. I was stunned when I found out Alex Chilton was only 16. It's such a mature voice, and with a real growl, like he's living the situation.

But he wasn't, not really. He was just a high-school kid from Memphis. Half the Box Tops were replaced, and the new combo got to Number Two with "Cry Like A Baby". And that was it. Still only 19, Chilton went to New York to try to make it on his own terms. Big Star, the group he founded, never became big stars, and nothing else he did over the decades made big money, save for the Bangles' cover version of his song "September Gurls". If you ran into people who knew him, you heard he was washing dishes in a restaurant in New Orleans or back in Tennessee living in a tent. But by the Eighties a big chunk of an entire generation of musicians had been influenced by Alex Chilton and Big Star. Their records turned up regularly on lists of all-time greatest albums, and Cheap Trick, REM, Garbage and many more raved about Chilton's songs. He's one of those figures - like Jack Cole in jazz dance - whom the public hasn't really heard of ...but they've heard of all the guys who were influenced by the guy they've never heard of. Over the years, he wrote what he wanted, sang what he wanted, including jazz and standards and a wacky version of a former Song of the Week, "Goldfinger". Perhaps if you're Number One when you're 16, you've got nothing to prove. But it's a good thing Davy Crockett didn't feel that way after killing the b'ar when he was only three.

So that's our odd little medley, two songs joined by the obituary column. Fess Parker was the beneficiary of a multimillion dollar global phenomenon, Alex Chilton a cult favorite bubbling under the surface for decades. Except that, in the end, he wound up starring in his own "Ballad Of Davy Crockett". In 1987, the Replacements wrote a number called "Alex Chilton":

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton
When he comes round they sing
I'm in love, what's that song?
I'm in love with that song...

Born down in Memphis town in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free:

Lonely days are gone, I'm a-goin' home...

Rest in peace.