The original, of course, is a Shel Silverstein song made famous by Dr. Hook. To steal a chunk from my post on another famous Dr. Hook tune, which mentioned this in passing...
It turns out Sylvia's Mother is a true story too - Shel was in love with a woman called Sylvia Pandolfi, but she ran off with another man and ended up as a curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. Shel tried desperately to rekindle that romance, but the only contact he had for Sylvia was her mum, and she wasn't having any of it. Nowadays, she'd probably report him as a stalker. I guess "Please, Mrs. Pandolfi" didn't quite scan, so Avery it was.
Yes, Mrs. Avery made quite the impression on us. So much so that she (or her Namesake... though surely there can be only one true Mrs. Avery) also shows up here...
Who are we to wonder, Mrs Avery
Who are we to wonder about Beverly
Evergreen girl
Beverly
Why did you leave me?
Why did you leave me in 1955?
And here...
Back home on the street
After 10 at night
Mrs. Avery walks her dog
Checks to see what's going on
She doesn't lock the door
She lives here in good health
You don't hear the horn
When Mrs. Avery walks her dog
And perhaps her final fate is revealed here...
You took me for a drive
And you said how Mrs. Avery died
The chilly golden sky
Seemed not to have been notified
David Rotheray, former songwriting partner of Paul Heaton in The Beautiful South, produced a whole album worth of "answer songs" back in 2013, including this...
...though I have to confess, I'm not sure if there's any connection to the original there. More appropriate is this...
Likewise, I can't make out any direct continuation of the story here...
Our best hope for an official sequel to Sylvia's Mother comes from The Men They Couldn't Hang, on their 2009 album Devil On The Wind. Here, Mrs. Avery has to deal with the young man who kept pestering her over the phone in the original song. He's now camped out in her garden, bemoaning the disappearance of Sylvia, so Mrs. A has to call his dad to come sort him out... I'm not quite sure how she reacts when dad then puts the moves on her. But let's be charitable and hope for some kind of happy ending...
Fascinating stuff.
ReplyDeleteGood to hear the back story to a classic song.
Am I the only one who could hear a slight resemblance of the music of TMTCH song with the Dr. Hook song?
ReplyDeleteProbably intentional.
DeleteFor someone who was time poor you packed a lot of info into this one. One of my favourite songs from that era. A boy in my class at school always managed to squeeze out a few tears when he sang it - it was his party piece.
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