Dick Davy - Presenting… Dick Davy (mint green w/black splatter vinyl)
Should you happen to sit down some sweltering evening with “Presenting Dick Davy” on the hi-fi, perhaps having some passing familiarity with Dick Davy’s heretofore known oeuvre, we imagine it might be around track 4 on side A— “The Bar-Mitzvah Dude Ranch”—that you set down your julep, take another look at the incredible Tony Millionaire cover art, and bring forth the album insert for further information. Why? Because something about the “Arkansas Fellow Traveler’s” stilted fluency with Yiddish and his comfort with the bouncy strains of Hava Nagila seems to stand in direct opposition to his honeyed, unhurried, down-home accent, hinting at a deeper backstory to this earnest son of Evening Shade, Arkansas. Indeed, not only has this album been lovingly unearthed, restored, and released to bring more Dick Davy to the comedy-loving public, it is the culmination of a great deal of dogged, devoted, possibly deranged detective work into the entertainer himself.
And that album insert? Well, it’s a doozy, explaining how the recordings on this album bookend the Dick Davy you may already know, how they show two sides of the same career, and how tugging on thread after thread can finally bring the whole curtain down. Jason Klamm, author and host of Comedy on Vinyl, writes in the extensive accompanying book about how his search for the real Dick Davy yielded the wild story of a young cantor, the politically leftist son of a politically leftist New York rabbi, steeped in folk music and anti-war passions and nights at the Apollo, who honed a comedic sensibility and established a common humanity with his audiences by adopting, well, a new persona. And then, two records later, he seemed to be gone.
It's comedy, mystery, and history, all in one, and we here at Stand Up! Records couldn’t be any more aw-shucks and gee-whiz excited to be “Presenting Dick Davy.”
Tracks
- Evening Shade, Arkansas
- If I Know'd
- The Newspapers
- The Bar-Mitzvah Dude Ranch
- Litterbug
- It Ain't Easy
- Used Car
- McCarthy and Kennedy
- Matzoh Ball Trip
- The Draft
- Evening Shade