BOBBY SCOTT: Slowly

 

1 Slowly 06:04
2 Jean 04:33
3 The Rainbow Connection 05:12
4 When I Fall In Love 04:35
5 Spend An Evening 04:54
6 Long About Now 05:33
7 You Turned The Tables On Me 05:10
8 Hi Lily Hi Lo 03:53
9 Am I Blue 04:08
10 Music Maestro Please 07:46
11 This is My Country 06:04

I remember when Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass recorded 'A Taste of Honey.' It was played too fast and too silly, as if the sound track of an ad for bubble gum. It was, being the '60s, that decade of bubble gum, a humongous success. Herb Alpert even founded an entertainment empire on 'A Taste of Honey.' I remember I hated that record. It not only trivialized a beautiful and heartbreaking song, but I always presumed that the teenyboppers presumed Herb Alpert wrote it! Bobby Scott wrote it! And, at least, earned some serious royalties. Bobby sang the song himself, as it oughta be, on a 1970 album for Warner Brothers called Robert William Scott...ln Memory of The Race. Bobby also sang on that album another hit he'd written, popularized by The Hollies, 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother.' But the best song on that album was another heartbreaker, a song he'd written with Mort Goode, 'I Wish I Could Walk Away.' And even after 20 years out of print, I nonetheless answer requests to play that album on the radio. Most of what he's recorded as a singer -- a and he's recorded plenty through the years for Atlantic and Mercury and Columbia-is out of print. That's why I was all the more ecstatic when -- at last! -- Bobby recorded again as a singer, this time for MusicMasters. For Sentimental Reasons was a musical highlight of 1989, and now comes Slowly, a new album equally delightful. Only ... also comes the twist of fate. Bobby Scott died November 5, 1990, as this album was just in production. We'd talked and corresponded over the last several years and I knew he was battling cancer -- but also knew that Bobby was tough, that Bobby would rage against the dying of the light. It comes to us all in time-but an artist's life plays on, an artist's work plays on, and Bobby's music plays on.