Los Pop Tops, "Mamy Blue"

YouTube is quite underrated as a music-discovery tool. Anyone reading this has been sent any number of YouTube links, so you know what it's all about; but when you watch music clips that way, do you often look through the other clips posted by that person and see what their tastes are like or discover more from the artist?

I find an incredible amount of material this way—material from my preferred rock era, 1967-1975. And it was via YouTube that I discovered "Mamy Blue", a #57 hit for a mostly Spanish combo called Los Pop Tops in 1971. (Don't mind the uneven lip-synching in this clip.)

Sometime last year, someone had recommended to me "Oh Lord, Why Lord," a Los Pop Tops song from '68 that had missed the charts here. I checked it out: words beseeching ethnic tolerance, set to Pachelbel's Canon in D (one of my very favorite of all melodies). But it was one of the "Related Videos," "Mamy Blue," that really drew me in.

The song, composed by Frenchman Hubert Giraud, is a mournful ode to a mother left behind and now gone, presumably dead, and in the sobbing rasp of Trinidadian lead singer Phil Trim, it becomes amazingly powerful. "I may be your forgotten son," he begins, "who wandered off at 21 / It's sad to find myself at home /And you, you're not around. / If I could only hold your hand / And say I'm sorry, yes, I am / I'm sure you'd really understand." The second verse tells us how much he cherishes his childhood memories, tells us he regrets not spending time with her, doesn't tell us why he's her "forgotten" son. He's "been through all the walks of life," but he finds no cause for celebration in that. I imagine the untold storyline as being something like Diana Ross and the Supremes' "I'm Livin' in Shame," only without silly details about knives and plates, which I guess makes it something like Imitation of Life, which is all to say it's a story of how Mom raised an elitist ingrate. (See also: "Someday Mother will die and I'll get the money / Mom leans down and says, 'My sentiments exactly, you son of a bitch.' " —TMBG)

But I digress. "Mamy Blue" has been recorded numerous times since its Pop Tops rendition, most versions lacking any real feeling. Stories, who'd just gone to #1 with "Brother Louie," took a rocked-up version to #50 in 1973. I've been thinking that in hindsight, having just pushed America's buttons with a song about a mixed-race relationship, Stories' releasing a song with the title "Mamy Blue" may not have been especially shrewd.