Dick Murry sent me the following…
With respect to your recent "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat" festival, Stubby Kaye's original rendition is, in my opinion, far and away the best.
Speaking of Mr. Kaye, an equally memorable performance was in the 1959 movie Li'l Abner when he sang Jubilation T. Cornpone. He also played Marryin' Sam in the Broadway production.
Speaking of Li'l Abner, since you are well plugged into the illustrated comics community; how is Al Capp thought of these days?
Agree with your opinion of Mr. Kaye's performances of those two numbers. I also like him in the "I Love to Cry at Weddings" number in Sweet Charity. He really was a talented guy. And I know all about Li'l Abner on stage and screen, having researched them extensively for this article and this article.
I would guess that if you polled a roomful of cartoonists and experts on newspaper strips about Mr. Capp, you'd hear that he was a very good artist and that his strip was brilliant for most of its run…until its last decade when it went into serious decline, eventually becoming a pretty sad, clumsy mess. And if you asked about Al Capp the human being, you'd hear that he was a rather lousy excuse for one — and today would have or at least should have gone to prison for his misdeeds.