Shelley Fabares - Very Unlikely

What are we looking for, after all, in written music? Think for a moment of the several ways in which the new idiom of blues made tentative appearances in popular song and piano music for at least fifteen years before the minor blues explosion of 1912. Blues traits, however, stick out like the proverbial sore thumb in certain idiosyncratic harmonic progressions, phrase structures, and melodic turns. For that matter, the syncopations that characterize cakewalks and rags are equally obvious.

Here too, there is a long period of preparation in which what we might call proto ragtime syncopation pops up, often together with pentatonic melody, both of them no doubt going back to the minstrel shows of 1840 and of course before that in oral tradition. But jazz lacks such easily transcribable and readily recognized distinctive features. We surely need to keep looking, it would be a great help if we had an authoritative bibliography of New Orleans music imprints before 1900. Surely... some visitor would have attempted a description in a diary, a letter home, a travel book, or some other means that would make up for the lack of traces in published music. One immediately thinks of the extraordinary Greek born Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), who during his stint as a reporter in Cincinnati in the late 1870s wrote exceptionally detailed descriptions of roustabout songs and dancing in Ryan's dance house, a riverfront dive.

Bringing ragtime into the picture may seem to offer clarification to the beginnings of jazz, inasmuch as we know when ragtime began. But actually we know nothing of the sort, all we know is when ragtime sheet music in its various forms began being published in Chicago and New York and, consequently, everywhere in the country, not to speak of Western Europe. But just as the origins of jazz become fuzzy once we begin looking for jazz before jazz, so it is with ragtime.

Source: The Nineteenth Century Origins of Jazz By Lawrence Gushee

Shelley Fabares - Very Unlikely

• First released: January 1962
• Released on: Shelley! album
• Written by: Gary Geld, Peter Udell

"The first single from the album was Johnny Angel, performed by Shelly Fabares on The Donna Reed Show. The song was released shortly before her Shelley! album and became a #1 US Hot 100 hit for two weeks on the pop chart."

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