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Smoke trails (ODT)
25 April, 2010Page 1
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Pixie Costello, nee Williams, the woman whose haunting voice helped carry a soldier's song to international fame, doesn't know what all the brouhaha is about.
"I thought all the fuss had died down ages ago," she said earlier this week from the Upper Hutt rest-home where she has lived for a year. In fact, Pixie would much rather talk about Dunedin, her home for six decades before she moved north.
However, although that connection is interesting, it was not the primary reason for the call. Anzac Day is looming and so is the release of a new version of Blue Smoke, a tune written by Ruru Karaitiana. A man on his way to war, Karaitiana penned the piece in 1940 while off the coast of Africa on the troopship Aquitania.
Shelley HiriniPixie was off to a party in Wellington on Tuesday night to celebrate the reworking of the seminal piece. Her daughter, Amelia Costello, an integral figure in the song's re-release, had popped in earlier that day to help her get ready for a private function involving family, friends and Wellington singer Shelley Hirini, the voice behind the new recording.
Pixie was looking forward to the outing, mainly because it involved music ("I think it is the balm of life"). Certainly, the excitement had little to do with reliving past glories. Of the success of Blue Smoke, she says: "It's a phenomenon, isn't it, but I still can't understand why."
According to New Zealand music historian Gordon Spittle, Blue Smoke was the first all-New Zealand hit record.
"The 78rpm disc was the first record wholly produced in New Zealand from composition to pressing, and provided a debut hit-seller for the New Zealand-owned TANZA (To Assist New Zealand Artists) record label... Blue Smoke topped New Zealand radio hit parades for six weeks, and sold more than 20,000 copies within a year."
The song also attracted strong overseas interest, according to Spittle. English duo Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth met Karaitiana and recorded a version.
In the United States, covers were released by Dean Martin, Al Morgan, Teddy Phillips and Leslie Howard. In 1951, New York music trade magazines described Blue Smoke as one of the major hits of the year, a "musical jackpot" with both jukebox and radio listeners.
New Zealand music writer and critic, Chris Bourke, whose book, Blue Smoke: the lost dawn of New Zealand popular music, 1918-1964, is to be published by Auckland University Press in October, says Karaitiana was living in Brighton, near Dunedin, when he took a phone call from crooner Martin asking if he had any more songs like Blue Smoke.
Yet there is a modesty among those most closely involved with the piece. Of the success of his song, Karaitiana was quoted in an Otago Daily Times article on April 5, 1952, as saying, "These things are simply a matter of luck.
"I owe a lot to a fellow soldier. We were on the troopship Aquitania in 1940 off the coast of Africa when a friend drew my attention to some passing smoke. He put the song in my lap. It was a natural."
Though Blue Smoke is the song for which he is best known, Karaitiana told the Otago Daily Times in 1952 that it was a "poor first effort". Pixie, likewise, prefers some of Karaitiana's other tunes, such as Windy City, and Let's Talk It Over.
Pixie recalls she wasn't that interested in singing with Karaitiana when he first asked her in Wellington in 1947. In fact, Karaitiana had initially approached her friend, Jude Chettleburgh, a secretary and model (and his future wife).
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