Mona Tachibana -- Namida no Samba（涙のサンバ）

 

I'd like to give my sincere thanks to former "Kayo Kyoku Plus" contributor and good friend JTM for giving me a disc of 1960s and 1970s kayo kyoku by female singers titled "Enka Joushi Kou ~ Onna-tachi no Banka"（怨歌情死考～女たちの挽歌～...Songs of Grudges and Thoughts of Lovers' Suicides ~ Women's Elegies）. OK, that title might be terrifying to some but the songs covered are in the pop and Mood Kayo vein as performed by Ako Midorikawa（緑川アコ）, Noriko Ogawa（小川節子）and others with the lyrical theme of how love has done women wrong.

One of the songs that I heard last night on the CD was Mona Tachibana's（橘モナ）"Namida no Samba" (Samba in Tears) which, as the uploader of the video has put it, isn't really a samba. Maybe it's more of a horn-amplified cha-cha with a bit of rock, I'm not sure, but in any case, this was Tachibana's debut single in 1973. This was written by Kazuko Katagiri（片桐和子）and composed by Koumei Sone（曾根幸明）, and Tachibana would release one more single under that name.

Yes, "under that name". Tachibana has had a bit of name-based intrigue perhaps rivaling the trials and tribulations that the protagonists of the compilation's songs have endured. I don't know her birth name for sure but as an actress, she made her debut as Yukiko Shino（篠雪子）on the Japanese crime thriller series "Playgirl"（プレイガール）in different guest roles in 1970 and 1971 (JTM gave a very detailed account of the show on the blog a decade ago). But then from later in 1971, under her new stage name of Kiyomi Ohta（太田きよみ）, she was able to play one of the new main characters on "Playgirl" for several months. She made the switch to Mona Tachibana in 1973 for both music and TV but in 1975, she made yet another switch to Hitomi/Kazumi Yamazaki（山崎一美）for a couple of more singles and then back to Kiyomi Ohta for a 1979 single. Currently, she's working under the name of Kiyomi Sone（曾根きよ美）, after marrying composer Sone as noted above.