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If you noticed blunt omissions, mis-interpretations or even out-and-out errors,
please let me know:
Arnold Rypens
Rozenlaan 65
B-2840 Reet (Rumst)
Artist: Shirley Ellis
Author: Lincoln Chase/James McCarthy/Larry Kent
Label: Congress
Year: 1965
Top 10 US & UK. Comes from ring songs, popular in black communities throughout the US. There's an example on Sounds Of The South, the box set illustrating Alan Lomax's 1959 field trip throughout the South. He recorded three children in Como, MS singing and clapping a song called Mary Mack, coming real close.
Covers:
Surfs [as Clap tape]
Carmel [in The Drum Is Everything]
Belle Stars [top 20 UK]
Pia Zadora [top 40 US]
Tom Waits [in Clap Hands on live album Big Time]
Gam Gam [as Clap Clap on Pavarotti project For The Children Of Bosnia]
Lyrics and melody also pop up in Bill Parsons' Rubber Dolly (alias Bobby Bare), B-side of All American Boy ('58). The melody of the Rubber Dolly part is similar with the one in (My) Creole Belles from 1900 (Jens Bodewalt Lampe) and is also evident in fiddle-tunes Back Up And Push and Rubber Dolly Rag in the late 1920s. The Light Crust Doughboys sang it as Little Rubber Dolly for Vocalion in '39, Ella Fitzgerald as Wubba Dolly that same year.
If you noticed blunt omissions, mis-interpretations or even out-and-out errors,
please let me know:
Arnold Rypens
Rozenlaan 65
B-2840 Reet (Rumst)