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Shel Silverstein
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Out of 80 votes - Similar Artists: Johnny Cash, Hoyt Axton, Kris Kristoferson, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show
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Date added: 09/21/05 | Total listens: 5,003
Out of 80 votes
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- Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States
- Genre: Folk » Contemporary Folk
Editor's review
Talk about a Renaissance man: the late, great Shel Silverstein made his mark not only as a children's book author, a talent for which he's probably the most universally recognized (who here hasn't read "The Giving Tree" or "Where the Sidewalk Ends"?), but also as a poet, storyteller, cartoonist (including work for "Playboy," as ironic as that may now seem), singer, and songwriter. He cut several albums of his own (beginning with 1959's "Hairy Jazz"), and he wrote a host of classic songs during the 1960s and '70s, including "The Taker" for Kris Kristofferson, "Marie Lavau" for Bobby Bare, "The Cover of the Rolling Stone" and the brilliantly overwrought "Sylvia's Mother" for Dr. Hook, and the unstoppable "A Boy Named Sue," which became Johnny Cash's biggest hit. His songs are tinged with his natural-born nuttiness, but they're also deeply human and more than a little "outlaw" (as any good musician, or children's author for that matter, should be), speaking honestly and touching the spirit as clearly as any of the era's best progressive country, pop, and folk artists.
Biography
Anyone who has ever been touched by the special magic of Shel Silverstein by way of his hundreds of poems and stories, songs, books, cartoons, stage plays, and more than a dozen albums under his own name (on nearly as many record labels, since 1959) will be tickled and pickled by THE BEST OF SHEL SILVERSTEIN: HIS WORDS HIS SONGS HIS FRIENDS, a newly-compiled tribute by and for Uncle Shelby that arrived in stores August 2nd 2005 on Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT.
The collection builds on the excitement created this year by the success of "Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook", the first posthumously released literary work by Shel Silverstein (1930-1999). The book, in which Runny and his friends Toe Jurtle, Skertie Gunk, Rirt Dat, Dungry Hog, Snerry Jake and other speak a curious language of their own, was the #1-selling children's book in the country this past spring, and remains among the top 500 best-selling books as listed by Amazon. The spoken word CD version was released by HarperAudio on September 20th, 5 days before the 75th anniversary of its author's birth.
It has been two decades since Shel Silverstein reunited with Columbia to record his two classic Columbia spoken word albums, 1984?s Grammy Award-winning Where "The Sidewalk Ends" (which commemorated the 10th anniversary of that book's publication in 1974), followed by 1985's "A Light In The Attic" neither of which has been out of print for one day since its release. ("Where The Sidewalk Ends" was reissued in October 2000, as an expanded edition that upped its original 36 poems with 11 previously unreleased readings by Shel.) The 26 tracks included on "THE BEST OF SHEL SILVERSTEIN" intersperse a dozen of Shel's recordings of his poems from those two discs with 14 musical tracks that he wrote or co- wrote. The 14 songs highlighted by "The Unicorn" by the Irish Rovers, "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash, "Sylvia's Mother" and "Cover Of The Rolling Stone" by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, "The Taker" by Kris Kristofferson, "Marie Lavaux" and "Daddy What If" by Bobby Bare, "A Couple More Years" by Willie Nelson, and 4 titles by Shel himself have never been assembled in one volume before.
Compilation producers Didier C. Deutsch and Darcy M. Proper (who also served as mastering engineer) also include both sides of the rare 1971 non-LP single, "A Front Row To Hear Ole Johnny Sing" b/w "26 Second Song" for the first time on any album. As pointed out in the newly commissioned liner notes essay written by Mitch Myers, the journalist and NPR commentator from Shel's hometown of Chicago, the multi-talented artist had already been writing songs and recording albums under his own name for a decade when the general public heard his first hit tune in 1968, the Irish Rovers' version of "The Unicorn." The convergence of "The Unicorn" followed a year later by Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" forever engrained Shel Silverstein's name in the pop music pantheon. ("A Boy Named Sue," the only RIAA gold-selling single of Cash's 50-year career, was also his highest-charting Hot 100 pop single, staying at #2 for 3 weeks, behind the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women").
