by Richard Skelly » Mon May 28, 2018 11:44 pm
For a moment, forget about Blood Sweat And Tears final Top 20 hit. During Game 1 of the Stanley Cup showdown between Las Vegas and Washington teams, I distinctly heard a different Hi-De-Ho echoing to the rafters. ‘Twas from the Cab Calloway song Minnie The Moocher...either Cab’s original or a decent cover version.
Calloway’s song was from the Hi-De-Ho movie which featured an all-black cast. A couple of decades after that 1947 flick, Carole King and first husband Gerry Goffin were inspired to write a song actually called Hi-De-Ho. It too had a sense of rising-above-odds optimism.
Along with Lucretia MacEvil, it was one of two charting singles from Blood Sweat And Tears III. The previous BS&T album spawned three massive hits—You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, And When I Die and Spinning Wheel. Each in turn peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Hi-De-Ho got to #14 while Lucretia never rose beyon #29.
The slide continued with subsequent releases. One theory for the diminishing returns was revulsion by some industry bigwigs at the group cooperating with the Nixon administration to stage a State Department-sponsored goodwill tour behind the Iron Curtain. Skeptics wondered if an expedited Green Card for Canadian lead singer David Clayton-Thomas was part of the deal. Despite his meteoric rise to BS&T fame, David had a criminal record back in Ontario. Without a Green Card he was vulnerable, at any moment, to apprehension and deportation.
In my opinion, David and his colleagues got a bum rap. State Department of both Republican and Democratic persuasion had long tapped jazz bands to show off made-in-America music to foreign audiences. No original members in the current Blood Sweat And Tears, but the band has always been—first and foremost—a jazz act.