Na Hoon-a

Artist: Na Hoon-a

LP: 2nd Collection of Hit Songs Sung Again

Song: "Love In a Dream"

[ listen ]

Song: "Three"

[ listen ]

I just returned from a fun weekend in Centralia with friends who will be moving away to Wisconsin next month. On our way back to Seattle, we stopped at the GoodWill thrift store in Olympia, where I found, amongst the myriad Ray Conniff and Engelbert Humperdinck LPs, this uncommon-in-these-parts 1977 collection of hits by South Korean "trot" singer Na Hoon-a. 

Hoon-a released his first record back in 1966, and, according to this piece in The Korea Times, the handsome and debonaire singer will be retiring after a few final concerts later this year! I'd love to find out how his record ended up in Olympia's GoodWill bins; there's only one copy available on Discogs, and it's in Germany. Some interesting Na Hoon-a trivia can be found on Wikipedia...in 2008 he threatened to expose himself on live television to end rumors once and for all that he had been castrated by Japanese gangsters!

Thanks to the miracle of Google Translate, the English-language lyrics to the songs posted above are included below. It's incredible how it seems I could have written "Love In a Dream" myself in the summer of 1986, when I was smitten by Shawn Bagley. We met at the church dance while he was visiting his cousins in Yakima for the season from Belleville, Illinois!

LOVE IN A DREAM

Because it's a sin to love someone you shouldn't love, 

should my speechless heart cry tonight too?

Because it's a sin not being able to forget someone who should be forgotten,

without you, should my heart cry tonight too?

Ah, love - my sad love - if it's a one-night dream that I will never see again, 

I'd rather close my eyes

Don't do it, because it's a sin to love someone you shouldn't love

Should my speechless heart cry tonight too?

THREE

This feeling of leaving and the feeling of letting go

We can't say everything we want to say to each other,

but the one thing I want to say is I loved only you. 

Nora, I truly loved you.

The joy of love and the sadness of separation - now you and I can't be together again.

I still want to leave behind one thing...

The words I only loved you. I truly loved you.

[ Na Hoon-a ]

Bae Ho (배호)

Artist: Bae Ho (배호)

LP: Ten Hit Songs (힛트가요 10)

Song: "Who's Crying (누가 울어)" 
[ listen ]

It took some crafty online sleuthing to figure out who this handsome Korean singer is, and what his album and songs are called. Google Translate actually says the track posted here is called "Who Cry," so I took some minor liberties with that one. Other titles on this 1972 posthumous release of ten Bae Ho hit songs include "돌아가는 삼각지" (Triangle Back), "안개속에 가버린 사람" (People Went Away In the Fog), and "능금빛 순정" (Genuine Gold Performance). You'll find a complete track list in Korean here. According to the limited English-language information I found online here, Bae Ho's pop star began to rise in the 1960s as a singer who blended the sounds of Korean folk songs, Japanese Enka, and the large pop ensembles of the West to create a lush, lovely sound for his deep baritone voice. Sadly, Bae Ho died of nephritis (inflammation of the kidneys; I had to look it up) in 1971, when he was only 29 years old. The website linked to above says that only the elderly in Korea remember the singer nowadays, but this sketchily-translated Wikipedia page seems to indicate that Bae Ho was voted one of the top favorite Korean singers of all time. I can now say with confidence that he is definitely one of mine.

[ Bae Ho: April 24, 1942 — November 7, 1971 ]

David Lloyd Whited & Cho Yong-Pil

Artist: Cho Yong-Pil

LP: The Woman Outside the Window

Song: "Short Hair" 
[ listen ]

I'd like to thank local author, storyteller and poet David Lloyd Whited for introducing me to Cho Yong-Pil, one of South Korea's most popular and influential singers. Some even call Yong-Pil the Michael Jackson of South Korea! I've never actually met David Lloyd Whited, but my nephew Maxwell turned four last week, and our family was getting together for his birthday dinner out on Vashon Island this past Sunday evening. As I was preparing to leave my apartment in Ballard on Sunday afternoon, my brother-in-law called to let me know about an estate sale on Vashon that he'd happened upon the day before. He said they had two entire rooms full of records! He thought I might be interested in stopping by to check it out on my way to the family dinner. 

David Lloyd Whited, who claimed Native American, Finnish, and Norwegian ancestry, was born in Canyonville, Oregon in 1951. He studied English, Mathematics, and Fine Arts in college and was a well-known author and poet here in the Pacific Northwest. He worked with Native American groups in Southwestern Oregon, where his efforts resulted in official recognition of five different tribes; his more recent work was with the Puyallup Tribe here in Washington state, just outside of Tacoma. David had been living with his wife, Marian, on Vashon Island. Sadly, David passed away at the end of November; they were his records and other items that were being sold at the estate sale. You can find more information about David Lloyd Whited's life and work in his online obituaries here and here; more detail about his work with Native American tribes can be found here; go here and here to read about Whited's writing, and watch a video of David reciting one of his poems here. 

All of that is interesting, worthwhile, and commendable, but I'd like to talk about David Lloyd Whited's vast collection of records. When Jon, my brother-in-law, told me about the sale, I knew I couldn't resist stopping by, but I suspected I'd probably find two rooms filled with mainstream, widely-available records—Boston, Led Zeppelin, Journey, James Taylor, Chicago, Neil Diamond...and maybe some Kim Carnes, Gloria Gaynor, and Swing Out Sister for variety and spice. While it's true that some of those and other popular singers and groups were included in the collection (lots of records had reportedly already been carted away by others before I arrived on the scene), I found that when it came to collecting music on vinyl, David Lloyd Whited definitely had a thing for variety and spice. I'm surprised none of the online biographies mentioned David's appreciation for music, his wonderfully eclectic tastes, and his passion for collecting such a wide range of music on vinyl. It's worth reporting too that he was evidently one of the biggest Ramsey Lewis fanatics in Washington state! Multiple copies of numerous Ramsey Lewis albums were stashed at various intervals throughout his collection; I picked up a Ramsey Lewis LP that I'd never seen before and upgraded two others that I'd previously only found in shabby condition. 

David Lloyd Whited's amazing collection of LPs, 10" EPs and singles included everything from Brazilian bossa-nova to lively Dixieland jazz; from multiple albums by the likes of Sarah Vaughn, June Chritsy, and Dakota Staton to bunches of records by The Pointer Sisters, Xavier Cugat, Henry Mancini....and more! Soundtracks! Organs! Doris Day! It was thrilling to stumble across a fellow collector who obviously shared my enthusiasm for all different kinds of music on vinyl. I only wish we'd connected earlier so we might have been able to thumb through our record collections together. I bet we would have had lots to talk about. 

At some point David acquired this 1980 disco-synth album by Korean pop star Cho Yong-Pil, who you can read all about on Wikipedia here. (Did I mention that he's been called the Michael Jackson of South Korea?) So thanks again to David Lloyd Whited for introducing me to this guy...and to other artists too whose records I'll be posting in the days and weeks to come.

 [ Cho Yong-Pil, recently ]

[ David Lloyd Whited: January 28, 1951 — November 30, 2014 ]