Shambolar

Aki Aleong (1934–); Elmore F Sheriff (dates unknown);

Aki Aleong is the first composer of the 100 songs who is still alive, and, in fact, living in Brooklyn.

Well done, Mr. Aleong!

Aki Aleong wrote the words here and I assume he and Elmore Sheriff both worked on the melody. I was unfamiliar with this record until 2006. I was in Berlin for the first and only time in my life. Jeffrey Lewis had arranged for me to be part of a program there representing the ‘60s Village folk scene. The only person I knew in Berlin was Ed Ward, a music and modern culture writer who had written the liner notes for the double LP release of the first two Holy Modal Rounder albums on Prestige. He was living in what had been a part of East Berlin. As soon as I got in the door he said, “You’ve got to hear this”, and he put this record on. WTF, I thought. It sounds like…reggae doo-wop? But doo-wop was way before reggae. It went, calypso, mento, ska, bluebeat, rocksteady, reggae, doo-wop, happening in the mento to ska era. Eventually, I found out more details. Aki Aleong is part Chinese, and from Trinidad-Tobago. Sheriff was from Brooklyn. The credits on the record read, “Sheriff and the Ravels”. The song was based on an African work song. Wow, I thought, there’s a whole amazing lost genre here that never happened in the US. Afro-Caribbean doo-wop. The only other examples I could think of were Richard Berry’s “Louie Louie” and Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon”. Like “Shambolar”, “Louis Louis” was written in 1955; “Havana Moon” in 1956. And two guys named Berry. What are the odds?

And why did that devastatingly brilliant hybrid not flourish in the US, as it did in the Caribbean, eventually becoming reggae? Coulda, wouda, shoulda. Oh, and another historical breakthrough in “Shambolar” is the dropped F-bomb in line 25. Both Sheriff and Aleong recorded other doo-wop records back then, but in my personal opinion none of them were any good. Aki Aleong also recorded some pretty dull surf instrumentals in the early ‘60s, and sang on a few West Coast records. The most interesting one was “Fade Sun Fade”, recorded in Hawaii under the name of D and the Sugar Cane Factory,

I couldn’t find out anything about Elmore F. Shreriff, but Aki Aleong is best known for playing Senator Hidoshi in the first season of Babylon 5.