Song 38:
"Ain't Got No Home" by Clarence
'Frogman' Henry
Peak: 20
Year: 1957
Year end position: NA
Alphabetical Songs by Artist: 1/3
Chronological Songs by Artist: 1/3
Video?: No
Wikipedia?: No
Spotify?: Yes
This is the 3rd "Ain't" song we will get to in
this blog, and it wasn't a song that I was really familiar with. The more I listened to it, the more I
realized that I probably had heard it in a lot of different places without even
knowing it. First off, the grammatically
correct title for this song should be "I haven't got a home". That really sounds terrible, so Clarence
chose wisely.
This is the first song chronologically and alphabetically
that we will hear from Clarence "Frogman" Henry. It only managed to hit #20, so it just barely
snuck into the blog. This is also the
first song since "After Midnight" by Eric Clapton that didn't make it
to the year-end top 100. I guess that
makes some sense, since if it appears in this blog, it must have made the top
20, and usually that's good enough to be amongst the biggest hits of the year.
I was looking at Clarence "Frogman" Henry's chart
career, and I was curious whose career it most closely paralleled. Since he only had 3 hits and they came within
4 year of each other, he most closely matched Baby Bash or Billy Joe
Royal. Not exactly exalted company, but
hey, only three songs. It's 3 more than
I'm ever gonna have, so I shouldn't be so hard on Clarence. He did have a pretty distinguished career
outside of the charts. He played in a
New Orleans club for about 19 years, opened for the Beatles in 1964, and is in
the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, so maybe his chart work doesn't accurately reflect
how well his career turned out.
If you didn't know any better, you may think that
"frogman" may refer to him being in the Marines or something like
that, but the nickname comes from a singing style that he uses in some
songs(like this one) where he makes his voice go into a deep register that
sounds a little like a frog. It's a
strange effect that I'll get into in a little bit.
As I mentioned above, this song was the first top 20 hit for
Clarence "Frogman" Henry. As
such, it plays a little like an introduction.
There are three verses. The first
verse, Clarence is singing in his regular voice. At the end of the verse he says the lines
"I can sing like a girl / And I sing like a frog". These lines more or less set up the rest of
the verses. The second verse sounds like
a different person, but it is actually still Clarence. He's singing in falsetto and he sings
"I'm a lonely girl". He sings
the chorus in the same falsetto voice.
The last verse is very much like verses one and two in content, except
this time he's using a very deep voice and sings "I'm a lonely frog". He reverts back to his regular voice to sing
the chorus one last time. I'm not sure
what the purpose of these three voice shifts are, as the verses all seem to be
the same thematically. The singer is
saying what they don't have ("a home", "a man", "a
mother", etc...). There is no
bridge to speak of. It's pretty much
just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus.
If you didn't recognize the song by the frog voice in the
third verse, you may know the song by the chorus. There aren't actually any words to it. It's essentially just a lot of "Ooo"
sounds in a specific melody. Rod Stewart
co-opted it some years later in the chorus of "Some Guys Have All the
Luck" if you are familiar with that song.
It was also used in several movies like "Diner", "The
Lost Boys" and "Casino".
In a much less savory usage, the Rush Limbaugh radio show used this song
as theme music to his "Homeless Update". This seems in incredibly poor taste to me, as
this song is an upbeat song that doesn't seem to be about actual homelessness.
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