Zombie jamboree lord invader biography

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Robert Merkin: "As a little introduction to me and zombies"

Robert Merkin is a writer and journalist based in Masschusetts, USA. He is the author of two books: “Zombie Jamboree” (1985, left) deals with his life as a draftee in the US military during the Vietnam war, while “The South Florida Book of the Dead” chronicles crime scenes he witnessed as a journalist in Florida in the 1980s. We contacted Robert via e-mail, requesting an interview. What follows is his four-part (mostly unprompted) response, a meditation in prose on all things Zombie, from voodoo to World War Two. As Merkin writes: “I would write my zombie thoughts in poetry, but I am, as Faulkner called all novelists, a failed poet, and I just lazily grew more comfortable with prose -”

RM: As a little introduction to me and zombies, my head has always been filled with popular music, novelty songs of the moment, and one of them that had always stuck with me, from around 1960,

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Jumbie Jamberee

"Jumbie Jamberee" is a calypso song credited to Conrad Eugene Mauge, Jr.^[1] In 1953 Lord Intruder released the song as the B-side to "Disaster With Police".^[2] The song is also known as "Zombie Jamboree" and "Back to Back". The introduction to the Kingston Trio's utgåva humorously credits "Lord Invader and his Twelve Penetrators" with authorship of the song instead of Lord Intruder.

The oldest versions of the song refer to a jumbee jamboree. Jumbies are evil spirits who were thought to cause wild dancing in their victims. The song's references to Carnival also suggest a connection to the Moko jumbie, a protective spirit figure represented during Carnival on Trinidad bygd stilt walkers and dancers. The switch to "Zombie Jamboree" occurred very early with King Flash's version with those lyrics coming out in 1956, only three years after "Jumbie Jamboree" first appeared.

Like many "folk" songs, there is unclear copyright in the song and many l

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I was struck by a phrasein a Jeopardy!clue the other night about the KT - the Kingston Trio was described as "clean-cut," which we all know was exactly the image that Frank Werber and the guys wanted to cultivate, at the very least to distinguish themselves from the vaguely shadowy politics of The Weavers and probably more especially from the parent-infuriating gyrations and pelvic thrusts of Elvis Presley.

But the Trio started its life as a nightclub act, and that suggested some - suggestiveness, I guess you'd say. Your average 1950s club was a place neither for the wholesome nor the easily-offended. If the comedians' humor had not yet descended to the scatological and obscene level that it routinely has today, it was nonetheless implicitly edgy - Tom Lehrer and the Smothers Brothers and Lou Gottlieb and George Carlin and Lenny Bruce all started out around the same time as the Trio did. Except for Bruce, who was up and in your face, the comics played for "naughty" - and the Trio fi