Panda Digital Releases Scatman Crothers Album

courtesy of Orange Grove Publicity

Today Panda Digital released a retrospective album of eight vocal selections by Benjamin Sherman “Scatman” Crothers. Born in 1910, Crothers’ first big break came when WFMK in Dayton, Ohio, gave him a slot for his own radio program. He attracted attention by improvising his own scat singing over instrumental tracks that he was airing. This led to his forming the trio Scat Man and His Cats, which toured the South extensively. In 1943 he moved to Hollywood; and, for the rest of his life, which ended in 1986, he established himself as a familiar presence both on television and in the movies.

One result is that his work as a vocalist has become all but forgotten. The new Panda release, entitled Groovin’ with… Scatman, has been released only in digital form with only one connection to his Hollywood career: he composed “Louie is Your Garbage Man” as a tribute to the character he played on Chico and The Man. That is one of three tracks that he recorded with background vocals and rhythm in August of 1979. One of the engineers for that session was Andrew A. Melzer, who recorded one of the other album tracks, “Stanley (Does It All)” (dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, for whom Crothers would play the role of Dick Hallorann in The Shining), in the den of his Beverly Hills home, probably overdubbing Crothers singing the words above his own rhythmic scatting. There are also four tracks of Crothers singing with a combo led by bassist Ray Brown.

The one downside of this release is that the Amazon.com Web page, hyperlinked in the preceding paragraph, does not include the booklet prepared for the album. Fortunately, Panda has created a Web page that serves as the virtual version of that booklet. As a result, the attentive listener can both enjoy the music and appreciate the background information behind that music.