I FIRST SAW HER ON THE RADIO AND IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT... In 1966, my military father was stationed in Ankara, Turkey. I was 13 years old and it was my first time to live overseas. For the first few weeks, I went through culture shock but after that I slowly began to absorb the culture; the food was good, the women were beautiful...what more could a 13 year old boy want? Well, television would have been nice but it simply was not available in Ankara back then. Books and records replaced television for me and to a certain extent, radio. But even radio, at that time, left a bit to be desired. Broadcast programs usually began of an evening and you never really knew what you were going to hear. It was grab-bag programming but never dull. One night I tuned in and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs came blasting out of the old wireless. That’s the last song I expected to hear on a Turkish radio station. The song following that was “Satisfaction” by the Stones. This was two or three years before I officially started my broadcasting career, but even then, I knew this was a very strange form of programming. The third song that was played made little programming sense as well…but I didn’t care because suddenly my ears beheld the voice of an “angel”. The title of the song was “Evermore” and the name of Songstress was Edna Savage…and I was in LOVE… and for about 35 years that’s all I knew because trying as I may, I could not uncover ANYTHING about Edna Savage. Fast forward to 2001; I am researching a British singer from the 1960s named Michael Holliday. I happened to befriend a British author who had written a biography about Holliday and he shared some valuable information and even unreleased recordings by the singer. Amongst the information was a brief mention of a radio show and four duets that Michael Holliday did with another singer, Edna Savage. A quick internet search led me to “Amazon.co.uk” which led me to a CD titled…EVERMORE! I wasted no time placing an order for this long lost audio treasure… and just staring at her image and thinking…that’s how I thought she would look. I was thirteen again and still smitten. The song, “Evermore” was her first release in 1955. She went on to have popular shows on BBC radio and TV during the 1950s but was never a huge seller of records. Her career all but fizzled at the end of the 1950s which explains why I could never find out much about her. Her life was not a very happy one as she watched four marriages dissolve, not to mention she could never fully recover her singing career. One bright spot for Edna was her twin daughters and a grandson. She died on December 31, 2000 at the age of 64. The liner notes from the CD package broke my heart as Mike Dutton wrote: If anyone has photographs (Particularly in colour) of Edna Savage from 1950’s and would like to share these with her daughters (Samantha and Allison)please contact us here at Vocalion and we will be happy to put you in touch with them. I barely found enough images to edit this video together, but, for me, it all started with a voice and a song, Evermore.... youtu.be/Y5zC-YspL-8
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 22:37:33 +0000
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