Lou Carter - If I Had A Nose Full Of Nickels
Track 12 from Golden Crest LP CR 3010, "Louie's Love Songs."
Journeyman jazz pianist and arranger Lou Carter worked with Jimmy Dorsey and played in the Soft Winds trio with Herb Ellis and John Frigo before finding his niche as "Louie the Singing Cabbie" in the late 1950s. His first album, "Louie's Love Songs," released in 1957, presented artful arrangements of strings, jazz guitar, woodwinds and brass backing novelty cocktail numbers with unlikely titles like "Whattsa Matta Wit Me," "Only a Room in the Cellar" and "April in Peoria." The success of "Love Songs" led to regular appearances on both Perry Como and Julius La Rosa's television programs.
The entirety of the first side of Louie's 1958 follow-up, "Louie Writes Again" consisted of the short musical comedy "Aqueduct Alley," a set piece in six "scenes" plus a 32-second overture and 41-second finale.
Both albums are long out of print, and it's hard to find information on them, but a 2006 post about Lou Carter on WFMU's Beware of the Blog (the source of this music) includes a number of interesting reader comments:
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/06...