We're still into the music of the post-War interregnum, before the rise of rock'n'roll and the invention of Youth Culture as we know it—the Truman years of pop. And today we're listening to "Peg o' My Heart," as performed by Jerry Murad's Harmonicats. It's a spectacularly weird recording, sonically sparse—just three harmonicas, anchored by the spectral growl of a meter-long bass model, doing a slow, ghostly dance over the old jazz standard—and still capable of raising a pleasant tingle in the nape.
It might have been just another novelty record (albeit an unfeasibly good one), and not a massive #1 hit, if not for a quirk of history: there was a strike of the musicians' union in 1947, resulting in a virtual studio lock-out. Jerry Murad, however, was able to book studio time because, by the union's definition, the harmonica was not a musical instrument! "Peg o' My Heart" was cut and released as a single at the height of the strike, when very few new records were coming out, and people bought it in droves.
Another with a strong media-tie-in: "Peg" served as the unofficial theme to Dennis Potter's television film The Singing Detective, and its tone of haunted nostalgia suited the project to a Tee.
A glance at the IMDb informs me that The Singing Detective has now been remade... with Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson? With the lead character's named changed from Philip Marlowe to... Dan Dark?!?
Shriek.
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