Above you see a brand-new video for Douglas John Imbrogno’s 2004 composition, “I Never Slept With Allen Ginsberg.” This remarkable song has a terrific backstory which you can read all about over at Doug’s excellent WESTVIRGINIAVILLE website (which you should be reading already anyway).
In short, the song is a fond rememberance of his time spent hanging out with the famed Beat Poet around a campfire at Cedar Lakes, in Ripley, West Virginia. Doug tells that story much better than I could, so follow that link up there and read the whole thing. It’s really good.
But there is a footnote to the story of this song. Back in 2006, when Doug was my editor at The Charleston Gazette, and had just greenlit the Radio Free Charleston video show, Doug was performing as half of a duo called “The Heydays,” with Paul Calicoat (of Route 60 Music and solo fame). Late in the year we had The Heydays come into LiveMix Studio to record a couple of songs for the show. We used the first song, “Shady Grove” in November of that year. The second song got a more elaborate video treatment (though I was still learning to edit at the time) and showed up on episode 15 of RFC in February, 2007.
That song was a different version of “I Never Slept With Allen Ginsberg.” And yes, I know I spelled his name wrong in the titles.
While the version we had on RFC was great, it did not have Ammed Soloman’s amazing percussion, which lifts the song to new heights.
For the sake of completedness and comparison, below you see episode 15 of Radio Free Charleston, featuring music from The Appalachian Celtic Consort and The Heydays, plus our usual animation and mind-hurting weirdness. At around the nine-and-a-half minute mark, you can see and hear a different take on Doug’s song.
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