Song Of The Day 5/5/2016: Julie Andrews – “(Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song”

Quarterly Covers Report – Let's get one thing straight: I love Julie Andrews. When I was a kid she was one of my idealized notions of womanhood, along with Karen Valentine, Kate Jackson, Madeline Kahn and Suzi Quatro. I realize The Sound of Music was essentially just a melange of repressed Catholic and Nazi fetishism and that many songs were composed by calculus, but I don't care. I realize that Mary Poppins was a tame LSD trip and that Dick Van Dyke (one of my first idealized notions of manhood) couldn't pull of an Cockney accent, but I don't care. Julie was somebody I believed in, to whatever extent a six-year-old with tics and unfettered access to The Match Game can believe in anybody.

In the '80s Julie did her one and only country album, Love Me Tender. It was not as notable as the only other country album by a British singer I can think of at the moment, Elvis Costello's Almost Blue, but it does have an alchemy of properness and layman subjectivity that... I won't say it works, but it's an interesting musicological rabbit hole you might want to scurry around for 35 minutes if nothing's on TV. There's even a duet with Johnny Cash on the title track. He sounds deferential for a brief second. But I prefer Julie's version of the B.J. Thomas hit "Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song" (the hit version of which I thought was done by Charlie Rich, but it was B.J.). It's very proper. It's got elocution. You can take the cowgirl out of the Von Trapps, but...