Yasuhiro Abe -- Tennessee Waltz (テネシーワルツ)

 

The last time that I had Yasuhiro Abe（安部恭弘）up on the byline for a song was back in October 2020 when I wrote about his "Yasashii Saigo no Natsu"（優しい最後の夏）from his 1987 album "Urban Spirits". That's quite a lot of City Pop Fridays missed since then.

Well, I guess I'll have to rectify that immediately. But to let it be known, when I first noticed the singer-songwriter's 9th single, "Tennessee Waltz", in his discography, I initially assumed that it was Abe doing a cover of the Patti Page country classic. I figured that he had the chops to do an excellent cover of the song as was also the case with the late Chiemi Eri（江利チエミ）.

However, I was totally wrong in my assessment. Abe's "Tennessee Waltz" was his own creation with the singer composing it while Masao Urino（売野雅勇）was the lyricist and Akira Inoue（井上鑑）was the arranger. Released in April 1986, the whole thing about "Tennessee Waltz" is a pretty intense love affair which involved a dance to the original song. Abe makes his own creation a soaring and dramatic City Pop romp across Tokyo with the contributions of a soprano saxophone and growling electric guitar.

Now, this is indeed a treat. There's been some mention of the fact that it's pretty hard to track down any YouTube video of Abe actually performing on a music show or even in concert, so I was happy to find this one with him performing "Tennessee Waltz" on Fuji-TV's "Yoru no Hit Studio"（夜のヒットスタジオ）. The song begins at about 2:30 but in the interview portion beforehand, Abe pointed out that he had once been a home tutor with one of his students being actor/tarento Makoto Nonomura（野々村真）who pops up to confess that he hadn't been the best of the studying bunch. (Sorry but that video has been taken down but it's been replaced by a live performance of the song.)

Abe's "Tennessee Waltz" was also the final of three ending themes for Fuji-TV's "Mokuyou Drama Street"（木曜ドラマストリート...Thursday Drama Street） which was a 1985-1986 anthology series featuring various mysteries. The video above has an entire episode but being one of the earlier entries, it finishes up with Off-Course's（オフコース）"Endless Nights" as the ending theme here. By the way, the B-side to the single was "PUMPS" which can be found on Abe's "Frame of Mind" album.