20 February 1967
Challenge: listen to ‘The House With The Whitewashed Gable’ until the very end without cringing. It can’t be done! If the twee “dum-dee-dum-dee-dum” or the shameless gable-Mabel rhyme don’t get you, Joe’s jaunty spoken-word “Hi!” will. (As explained before, The Drifters here aren’t the US vocal group, just Joe’s backing band, eventually renamed His Drifters.)
‘The House With The Whitewashed Gable’ was originally ‘221 East Maple’, a 1966 US single by Ron Dante, who we’ll actually meet at number one in Ireland in 1969, albeit incognito, as the singing voice of fictional band The Archies. Anyway, the original title and lyric were clearly deemed too American for Irish audiences winter-fed on a diet of showband silage, hence the more rustic and less numerically-challenging adaptation. Maybe Joe was taken by those earwormly dum-dee-dums, or fancied his chances with the ’60s bubblegum pop consumed by US audiences, like the equally twee ‘Winchester Cathedral’ and ‘Dear Mrs Applebee’ of the year before. Whatever the reason, no means justify this end.
Being noted as playing in apartheid-era South Africa by the actual United Nations is probably the most shameful thing in Joe Dolan’s history. ‘The House With The Whitewashed Gable’ runs it close.
Irish Number Ones 