Ray Marimura & The Time Sellers -- Kyou mo Yume Miru（今日も夢見る）

Through "Kayo Kyoku Plus", I've found a lot of new singers, bands and great songs and those are not only the ones in the last couple of decades. Although not as frequently, I've also discovered some fine stuff even further back.

My image of Japanese folk music has usually hovered around the first half of the 1970s but of course, it most likely started up some years earlier. Well, I got that proof when I found out about this band called Ray Marimura & The Time Sellers（万里村れいとタイムセラーズ）. At first when I saw the band's name, I had first assumed that this was another Group Sounds outfit since the late 1960s was the time of Group Sounds.

However, the first hint that my assumption was wrong was seeing that group of four men surrounding a young lady. I don't think I had ever heard of a Group Sounds band with a mixed male-female lineup. And as it turns out, Ray Marimura & The Time Sellers was a folk group. Now it was really difficult to find out about this group...had to look through different sources and none of them were named Wikipedia.

Ray Marimura was born Kazuko Murakami（村上和子）in 1945 in Kanagawa Prefecture. While attending Keio University, she and some of her friends fell in love with folk music and formed The Four Dimes（フォア・ダイムズ）, a Peter, Paul & Mary cover band and released at least one single via Toshiba Records, "Yuuhi ga Shizumu"（夕日が沈む...The Setting Sun Is Sinking）in 1965.

Then in 1968, Ray Marimura & The Time Sellers, a band inspired by not only Peter, Paul & Mary but also The Kingston Trio, was born with the lineup of Takashi Nakane（中根孝...not sure if that is the right reading of his given name so apologies just in case）, Toshiyuki Kosaka（小坂俊幸）, Shigeto Muto（武藤重遠）and Michifumi Mishima（三島通文）, and Kobayashi taking on her new name. One of their hits was "Kyou mo Yume Miru" (I Also See a Dream Today), a gentle ballad of optimism about a couple seeing the possibilities and overcoming the difficulties. The song was written and composed by Yuko Kawamoto（川本優子）with assistance from Takehiko Maeda（前田武彦）and major composer Hachidai Nakamura（中村八大）. "Kyou mo Yume Miru" is a very calming and reassuring ballad with some nice harmonies.

I don't know whether or not Ray Marimura & The Time Sellers ever hung up their mikes for good into the next decade but they were giving performances as recently as 2014 in Shibuya. There's still at least one more song by them that has been represented on YouTube that I will have to check out and Marimura herself started a solo career earlier this decade.