Friends At The Table

(If you'd like to follow along to everyone watching Mr. Ed Plays Baseball at 1:22:24, here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlVr45CHOuA ) Three Out of Five It Ain’t Bad During the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Bluff City Boardwalk saw a surge (and then sudden decline) in the unusual genre of “Lovers’ Songs”. Enterprising organ grinders would charge participants a small sum, hand out a broadsheet, and then act as an accompanist to a lovesick singer.  These proved wildly unpopular. The songs were never particularly emotive, the cost was slightly too high, but the primary nail in the coffin was that it turned out that nobody liked to be sung to - in public - by a potential beau (who was invariably fighting the volume of a barrel organ two feet away).  Most of these songs had faded into obscurity by the time Elliott Callahan, in 1899, recorded “Three Out of Five It Ain’t Bad”, a song that fails - straightforwardly - at communicating anything about love, or indeed anything at all.    I wish I could g