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Locomotive Chorus. When country singing came out of the hills, its highly developed morbid strain came too, and the form soon adapted itself to new material: guitarists began twanging out such up-to-date items as Old Man Atom with a locomotive chorus ("Hir-o-shi-ma, Na-ga-sa-ki"). When little Kathy Fiscus died at the bottom of a California well in 1949, the Ballad of Kathy Fiscus was probably inevitable, like the more recent Ballad of Caryl Chessman and today's Ballad of Francis Powers.
Out of such a tradition and its emotions, transferred to the Lolita generation, it was also predictable that 1960-5 Tell Laura I Love Her, a collector's item among bad records, would bring a response from Laura. It has come—with the just-released Tell Tommy I Miss Him, whose sales are already climbing toward 50,000 records. Laura lugubriously moans:
He wanted so much to make me his wife ; Now our love lives on though he lost his life.