The wonderful Liz Hanns, the girl singer in the band, actually uses only a comparatively small range of notes, almost all in a lower register, but this she does in her unique Deep South style, with much tremelo and vibrato.  The effect is spine-tingling and utter joy to listen to.

Track 5 is the truly brilliant, plaintive, ”alabamy bound”, where Liz Hanns takes a strong, almost gospel lead, with a male vocalist doing a bit of a response in another mini call and response song.

Track 6 is “overseas stomp”, the shortest track on the record at a mere 1.22 minutes.  It is a great romp, with Liz Hanns again taking a strong lead, at times screeching like a cat.

Track 7 is the track on the sampler, “round & round”, another brilliant song of course, but where Liz Hanns plays only a small part.  A careful listen to this song does, however, give a valuable set of clues to what Liz Hanns was all about.

Track 8 is “cocaine habit”, a song I first came across as “Have A Whiff On Me” by Mungo Jerry.  It is a classic dope song, and done here to absolute perfection, with Liz Hanns again taking a strong lead.  Marvellous stuff.

Every track on this record is utterly brilliant.  The only thing which really makes any of them any better than any other is the extent to which the wonderful Liz Hanns contributes to the vocals.  The more she does, the more splendid the song.

In style there is not much difference at all on the record; the album is one of Louisiana style jug band blues from start to finish, but ther’s nothing at all wrong with that.

Track 1 is “38 plug”, an up tempo thing with lots of Swanee whistle, where Liz Hanns takes the lead.  This is a brilliant opener.

Track 2 is “going to germany”, where liz Hanns is limited to mini responses on a sort of mini call and response thing.  The song has much mouth organ, and the title line is sung as “goana german”.

Track 3 is “canned heat” which has a sparse guitar accompaniment, and Liz Hanns is again in the background.  There was of course an excellent band with this name, that I first heard doing “On The Road Again”, and who appeared at Woodstock.

Track 4 is the famous “viola lee”, which I first heard as the classic Grateful Dead version.  Here, thank God, Liz Hanns has a solo vocal; this one is a masterpiece.

Just a few more words on the CD insert, which, as noted above, is very nearly a straight clone of the LP cover, so far as I know it from the Canadian pressing.

However, under the track listing on the CD we get:

“all tracks trad: arr. Panama Ltd Jug Band except “alabamy bound”.

Contrast that with the LP version:

“all tracks trad: arr. Panama Ltd Jug Band except “Going to Germany,” by Noah Lewis, Peer International (BMI)”.

Odd, huh?  “Alabamy Bound”, of course, is not on the vinyl version I have.

As I mentioned earlier, you don’t get a clear picture of just how brilliant this record is from the sampled track “Round and Round”, splendid song though that be.  This is because the only girl in the band, one Liz Hanns, is restricted to backing vocals on that track.

Liz Hanns had a unique voice.  What you get with this is traditional Old Mississippi Mama as portrayed in films from or around the 1940s, but sung way over the top by a young English girl in 1969.  There is a hint of how this works in the backing vocals on “Round and Round”, but you don’t get the full effect until you hear the songs where she takes the lead, which is most of them.  The resultant sound is just ecstatic.

As mentioned last time, I am blessed to possess a commercially produced CD version of this near perfect album.  It was made in Spain in 2006, and released by Retro Disc International S.L. as RDI 33005.

As far as it could be, it is a straight clone of the Canadian version of the LP.  The front of the CD itself is decorated with the front cover picture.  However, it has many more tracks than the Canadian LP, which only has 10, 5 on each side.

The track listing is in exactly the same comparable place as for the LP in the CD insert, the 4 pages of which, as I say, very closely resemble the gatefold sleeve of the LP. In particular, the track listing is in the same lower case format, and arranged in two columns as if there were still “two sides”:

First Column

38 plug

going to germany

canned heat

viola lee

alabamy bound

overseas stomp

round & round

cocaine habit

Second Column

wildcat squall

don’t you ease me in

rich girl

sundown

jailhouse

guitar king

railroad

There are thus a mighty 15 tracks on the CD.  Being a straight clone of the LP there are no liner notes at all, so I have no way of knowing which, if any, are “bonus tracks”.

Before I resume the story of why this is not only the best of the albums sampled on “Picnic”, but also one of the best LPs ever made, I want to say a little about the CD.

You may recall that I said earlier that I had this both on vinyl and CD, and I did not simply mean the “burned” ones referred to above.

About a year after I got the Canadian LP, maybe 2006 or 2007, to my intense surprise and joy I got a commercially produced CD version of this album.  In those days I was on the mailing list of a chap in Cornwall, right at the furthest south west tip of England.  This guy was remarkable, indeed in my view verging on the miraculous.  About once a month he would send me a letter, in which would be listed about 20 CDs he had for sale.  What was unusual, however, would be that at least half of them would be things which never seemed to have been available from any other source; I guess maybe he was importing them from continental Europe.  Anyway, one day there appeared on the list the eponymous Panama Limited Jug Band album in CD format.  I could not believe my eyes, but of course ordered it straight away; and it duly arrived.

This is the track listing on the Canadian version of the LP:

Side One

38 plug

going to germany

canned heat

viola lee

cocaine habit

Side Two

wildcat squall

don’t you ease me in

rich girl

sundown

railroad

[Yes, all in lower case, sic.].

And that’s it, just 5 tracks per side, and your eyes do not deceive you.

Read that list again!

Remember, the kind guy had done a CD of this which he had thrown in for the price of the LP, with a sticker on it pointing out that the most well known track on the album is “Round And Round”, which was of course on “Picnic”.

This song is conspicuous by its absence from the Canadian edition!  No wonder my supplier repeatedly warned me that the version he was selling was the Canadian one.

Anyway, the first thing I did was to make a new CD, with “Round And Round” from “Picnic” added to the LP tracks, which CD I still have.  My guess is that this maybe approximates to the UK version of the record, SHVL 753, though I really do not know as I have never seen a copy of it.

Oddly, however, brilliant though “Round and Round” is, it does not give a clue as to the superlative quality of this first rate record, which is in my top 10 favourite albums, and all because of Liz Hanns.

I have mentioned above that I eventually found a chap in Canada who was able to sell me a Canadian pressing of this LP.  I should add at this point that he was also subsequently able to sell me a large amount of UK psychedelia which he had lovingly transcribed onto CD.  I propose at some future time to say something about this remarkable genre, which I had not really been aware of previously.

Anyway, back to the LP, which is SKAO-387 and distributed in Canada by Capitol Records (Canada) Ltd.  The record itself, however, apart from those details, has the usual Harvest label.

The whole of the inside cover has, partly as a background for the text, a large black and white photo of the band, who are listed on the right side as:

Dennis Parker

Gary Compton

Liz Hanns

Ron Needs

Brian Strachan

On the left side is a track listing, under which there are these credits:

All tracks Trad.: arr. Panama Ltd Jug Band Beechwood Music Corp.  (BMI)

except “Going to Germany”, by Noah Lewis, Peer International (BMI)

engineer JEFF JARRATT

produced by JONATHAN PEEL

sleeve design & photographs by Hipgnosis [Well done, chaps!]

More of the track listing, which held a bit of a shock for me, next time.

I have bought many LPs by mail, but I looked forward to getting this one more than any other before.  Part of the deal was that the chap in Canada would burn the LP onto a CD and send the CD with the record.  Sure enough, within a few days the package arrived, just as promised.

On the sleeve of the CD my vendor had stuck a little advertising stamp for the album, which he had got from somewhere, which made the point that best known track on the LP was “Round and Round”, having appeared on the “Picnic” sampler.

The LP itself was instantly recognisable from the facsimile of the cover on the inside cover of the sampler, which is of course in black and white.  The actual coloured front cover is an extraordinary blue and green “quasi-negative” photo, showing the band draped around an old railway wagon, with a bass banjo standing in the right foreground.  The overall effect is very striking indeed.  The back cover is a black and white drawing of the same scene, but shifted a few feet to the right, with no persons visible.  More instruments are shown here, including an acoustic guitar, a bass drum, and, naturally, a jug.

Let me in some ways spoil the story by saying at the outset that I now have this album, one way or another, both on vinyl and CD.  However, there is very much more to it than might at first appear.

At first, as I mentioned previously, given my experience to date I did not think it would be very hard to get this one.  In this, I was wrong.  Internet searches bore no fruit at all, and even though there were still quite a few record shops in those days that I was able to peruse, this one never came up.

Then one day, about 6 years ago, to my intense joy and surprise, I did find a guy on the internet who claimed to have the LP for sale on a list he published, and I think he was only looking for US$60 for it.

However, it turned out that he was in Canada, and right from my first contact with him, he warned me in the strongest possible terms that what he had to offer was a Canadian version of the record.  I hastened to assure him that I really didn’t mind at all, and the deal was struck.

Until about 1995, I had spent a quarter of a century assuming, albeit subconsciously, that most of these LPs were so obscure that they would never see the light of day again.  I guess it was probably only when I bought the Forest CDs round about then that my subconscious assumption began to weaken.

Within a few years, of course, the floodgates had opened, if only for a short window of time, and I found I was able to get “An Asylum For The Musically Insane” on CD!  At that time, it was still impossible to get “U” by the Incredible String Band on CD, though you could get all their other albums in that format, so these things could by no means be taken for granted.

Anyway, realising there was only one missing, my sole temporary secular objective became to obtain the last one.  Surely in the days of Google and the shrinking of the planet, this could not be too hard?  I had never thought I’d find “Quatermass”, but I had both CD and vinyl versions!

I had not twigged how elusive this last one would be, and I never dreamed of the way it would all eventually work out.  More of this saga next time.