Singer-Songwriter Joe South Dies at Age 72

[JoanieBlon]

I always liked the songs he wrote and performed, even though I'm basically a hard rock person....he earned 2 Grammys for "Games People Play."

Joe South, a singer-songwriter who wove confrontational lyrics into bouncy pop hits of the late 1960s and early ’70s, including “Games People Play,” “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” and “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” died on Wednesday at home in Flowery Branch, Ga., north of Atlanta. He was 72.

Read more HERE.

[beam-eye]

I waited a few days to post on this, hoping somebody (Bluespicker maybe?) would add something. I've read the NY Times obits for many years, and saw lots of interesting things about the "inventors" of the Popsicle, Eskimo Pie, The Hokey Pokey, the theramin, Philo T. Farnsworth (who invented television), the phrase "hubba hubba" (more my dad's generation), the demise of the slide-rule, the VW "bug", and Beta-Max, and more recently, Doc Watson, among many, many other memory ticklers about the ordinary (and some not so ordinary) people and things that add to the fun and viscissitudes of this American life, as she is lived, of which Joe South is but one.

He wasn't a "big star", but he wasn't just another flash-in-the-pan either. His "Games People Play" and "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" are catchy tunes with catchy words that are easy to remember long after the fact, akin to Don McLean's "Bye, Bye Miss American Pie" and "Starry Starry Night", Roger Miller's "King of the Road", and other simple tunes that outlive their time.

They're not the caliber of Rogers and Hammerstein, or Harold Arlen, or other "Broadway" tunesmiths, but they grab the ear buds and the memory centers, and they hang in there because you can hum, whistle, and sing 'em - they've got good staying power. (I saw "Miss Saigon", the Vietnam-era "Madame Butterfly"-inspired knock-off in London some years ago - there wasn't one song in the whole show that you could walk out humming, whistling, or singing - aside from "The American Dream", which was good listening, but more narrative than song - so, no "staying power" as a musical piece, which is what "song" and "tune" are all about. At the other extreme, when I first came to Playa, a taxi driver thinking to show me a good time took me to the Club Farallon on a side street next to the old Telebodega, where one of the naked pole dancers was flouncing around to the strains of the old Norman Greenbaum song "Spirit in the Sky (I've Got a Friend in Jesus") - only mildly bizarre, once you think of it. "What does it mean? the girls asked me - I couldn't even begin to tell them, and didn't have the heart to tell them it was 30-40 years old. So, staying power, of sorts, somewhere - "I gave it a 3, Mr. Clark, because it had a good beat, and you could dance to it.")

All of this reminds me of the famous Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, of the Montreal Neurological Institute, who discovered that the brain "records" the tune and the words of a song in different areas (which is why you can remember the tune, but maybe not the words - or vice versa, I forget). I don't have that problem with "Games People Play", or "Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie", or "Starry, Starry Night", or "King of the Road" - sometimes the words and music are so well-suited to each other, such a good fit, that they just flow along together without any effort on my part. So, thanks, Joe South - you're not unsung. And a nod to you, too, JoaniBlon, for taking the time to post this (and to Iry LeJeune, and Nathan Abshire, and Fiddlin' Frenchie Burke, all of whom I suspect had something to do with it). Keep on truckin'!