Sunday Morning with Margo Guryan

Back in the day, a favorite activity on Sunday mornings was hanging out in obscure little record stores and discovering oddities and rarities that I knew would never make it onto mainstream radio. Cruising iTunes, download.com or MySpace just doesn't have the same integrity of hold a big floppy vinyl disc in your hand.

So I was very pleased to discover Margo Guryan whose biggest claim to fame was penning the appropriately named "Sunday Morning," a late 1960s hit of the often annoying Spanky and Our Gang. I'm happy that I'd not discovered her until now since she sort of falls in to those very late bloomers like Nick Drake, Eva Cassidy or Vashti Bunyan who languished in close-out bends only to be rediscovered in the new millennium. Margo's style has been rechanneled in all those sixties fueled girl singers of recent years that range from Keren Ann, A Girl Called Eddy and April March.

I was pleased to actually by the disc, not download it at Amoeba, reminding me of Sunday mornings decades ago at Wilcox Records, a little shop run by an elderly couple in the front of an old bungalow on NW 23rd Street in Oklahoma City. Though well into their 70s, they had an exhaustive knowledge of classical to punk and never passed judgment on the oddest choice of tunes.