Mayhams Records / Mayhams Collegiate Records, 12 W. 117th St., Morningside Station, PO Box 46, New York, NY 10026.

Norridge Mayhams was a first-class card. In a half-century-long career in which he toiled as songwriter, performer and record company executive, Mayhams authored a body of work that is staggering in its scope, quality and general strangeness, with a fast-and-loose approach to crediting his work that confounds discographical comprehension.

Mayhams’s songwriting career stretched from the mid-’30s up until his death in 1988. His early songs, cut at various New York sessions between 1936 and ‘38, were lively but fairly conventional gospel and novelty blues. Even back then he was apparently subsidizing the recording of his own material; since song-poem companies had yet to evolve from sheet music to records, it seems that these early recordings were made with Mayhams’ hands-on participation, as opposed to the strictly mail-order nature of the true song-poem companies.

Neither blues nor jazz purists know quite what to make of Mayhams’ early recordings, their bewilderment compounded by the fact that he recorded for such highly-regarded labels as ARC and Decca. His records smell gutbucket enough, but if you sniff a little closer there’s clearly something a bit off about them, and as a result they are of but slight interest to collectors today. To appease completists, Austrian archivists Document Records have released a CD comprising the bulk of Mayhams’ known 78s, with a further four more included on a compilation CD. See our Miscellaneous Albums page for more information on these two collections, including ordering links.

One of the funny things about Mayhams’ early stuff is how quickly it jags from straight gospel material (”Crying Holy Unto The Lord,” “My Lord’s Gonna Move This Wicked Race”) to raunchy double-entredre blues (a cover of Tampa Red’s “Let’s Get Drunk And Truck,” “Ash Haulin’ Blues”). Still mingling the sacred with the profane, years later Mayhams would release, on his own Mayhams Collegiate label, a single of “Jesus Will Soon Be Coming” b/w “You’re My Surfer Girl Forever,” likely the world’s only example of a mixed Jesus/surfing 45. In Mayhams’ typically convoluted fashion, the Jesus song kicks a lot harder than the surfer one.