I spend a lot of time wandering around on YouTube. It’s amazing what you can find there, and I especially exploring old music on YouTube. There are a lot of videos of musical numbers from old movies and TV shows, as well as audio put together with collages of images. it seems like every song reminds me of another one, and I tend to wander backward in time.
Tonight I was feeling nostalgic, and I did a search for the song Peoria, otherwise known as I Wish’t I Was in Peoria. This was one of my favorite songs when I was a child listening to my father’s record of Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band. I remember the wild and free feeling of dancing to it, and the cheerful rhymes of lyrics like : “Oh you can pick a morning gloria right off the sidewalks of Peoria.”
I own the CD and have this on my iPod, but I was hoping to see a video of the original band playing, with the great Clancy Hayes doing the vocals. I’ve never seen them, and if I could find something like this anywhere, I knew it would be on YouTube.
And I found a performance of this song, not by Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band, but by the Duesseldorfer Banjo Club. And quite a lively performance it is, too:
I Wish’t I Was in Peoria — See the original sheet music cover
Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band, Vol. 2
For those of you who prefer a more traditional performance, here’s the CD of the record album I loved so much as a child in the fifties. There’s some great, old-school stuff here, including Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans and Blues My Naghty Sweetie Gives To Me. Bob Scobey was part of the San Francisco revival of traditional jazz started by Lu Watters and continued by Turk Murphy.
