Gamboling With Gamble Rogers
Itinerant south-central Florida troubadour ain’t no Rodgers and Hammerstein
Yet the New York Public Library lovingly preserves his songs and yarns, from ‘Habersham County Mephistopheles’ to ‘Bovine Midwifery’
Spoilers: His father swam at Dartmouth; His grand-uncle designed Yale’s library; He became a kind of folk-song Faulkner after drinking with the man himself at U. Va., just as Stephen Malkmus might have done.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound contains over half a million physical recordings stored in individually labeled slipcases so as to be easily retrieved by the hard-working archivists at the New York Public Library. The archive contains recordings of Billy Sunday preaching sermons, Irving Berlin singing his own songs, and Toscanini performing at the Metropolitan Opera. It is named after Richard Charles Rodgers and Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II, a New York-born songwriting duo who made a gazillion dollars creating Broadway hits set in places where neither man had ever traveled, such as Oklahoma!, a musical about a farm town in which the biggest word used by any of the hick characters is “Oklahoma” (unless you include compound words, such as “smart-alecky”). The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives is also home to a rare 12-inch LP titled Sorry Is As Sorry Does, recorded in 1986 by the itinerant postwar troubadour Gamble Rogers, five years before his sudden …
