Marty Cooper - American Portraits (2025)

Tracklist

01. Stephen
02. Their Roof Is the Sky
03. The Burlington Zephyr
04. The Mississippi Blind Boy
05. (I'm a) Yo Yo Man
06. The Ball Player
07. The Oklahoma Wrangler
08. A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Rock 'n Roll
09. In Santa Fe
10. The Indiana Girl
11. Cowboys and Daddies
12. You Can't Be a Beacon (If Your Light Don't Shine)
13. Think of the Children as Roses
14. The Biplane, Evermore
15. Little Bitty Ball
16. Under Your Wing
17. The View From Ward Three
18. The Leaves
19. Little Play Soldiers
20. One More Time, Billy Brown
21. A Stranger in Your Town
22. I Wrote a Song

From Don - “This is a most remarkable project - many years in the making. I first started doing recordings for Marty back in the 90s, to help him with his work as a music publisher - doing song demos etc. But we started doing recordings of Marty singing songs that he wrote but that others had recorded over the years - going all the way back to the late 1950s and early 60s. After a while it became clear that we had something really special. It’s taken a long time to get it into it’s present form - a truly first-class CD and booklet package, presenting Marty Cooper’s songs, that truly form a portrait of America in all its facets - the positive and the problematic, but always the land of the possible.” Marty Cooper is a storyteller of America, truly America's hidden balladeer. He has written number one hits, as well as songs covered by such luminaries as Stevie Wonder, Rod McKuen, Jimmie Rodgers, Sammy Davis, Jr., The Kingston Trio, The Brothers Four, Burl Ives, Bobby Bare, The Irish Rovers, and Jennifer Warnes. In a career extending back to the late 1950s and as an important voice of the 60s folk revival, Marty's worked with such LA studio legends as The Wrecking Crew and Jack Nitzsche. And yet, he remains largely undiscovered by the public at large. This collection consists mainly of Marty doing Marty – singing songs previously covered and made famous by other artists, like Donna Fargo's “You Can't Be a Beacon (If Your Light Don't Shine)”, which debuted at #1 on Billboard's Country Top 100, and “A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Rock 'n Roll”, the ubiquitous theme song of Donny and Marie Osmond, heard here with the original non-sibling lyrics. And there's protest songs censored by “the powers that be” back in the 60's, like “One More Time, Billy Brown” (originally sung by Burl Ives), because the message was deemed too inflammatory. But beyond all that, there is a portrait here painted with love and care of an America that we have largely lost – painted with the hope that perhaps we can find it, or some parts of it, again.

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