Just about finished putting together the playlist for tomorrow's Sammy Davis Jr. tribute show. It was really fun to go through my collection and put the songs together into meaningful sets -- his earliest sides for Capitol and Decca, his work with the Rat Pack, live recordings, "the cheese factor" from late in his career, etc. I'm not going to play anything really bad from his later work. No "Candyman" for instance. And I had to include one set whose theme is simply "songs I really like." Hard to narrow the show down to just 2 hours!
I didn't finish rereading the books but I've got more than enough material to fill the talksets. I don't want to fill the entire show with talk anyway, just a couple of minutes of interesting anecdotes between sets. Sammy was such a larger than life character that just like with the music, it's hard to narrow down the talkset material. For instance I was originally planning to talk about that infamous photo where Sammy hugged Nixon. Why did he do it, and what a huge mistake it was for his career and his standing in the black community. If it happened today we'd call it his "macaca moment." But looking at the flowsheet I don't think I'm going to have time to work it in.
All those who like Sammy, hope you can tune in tomorrow from 2-4. 88.7 if you're local, wxdu.org if you're not. And if you don't like Sammy, what's wrong with you?
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