Dec 14

Hamilton Camp

HAMILTON CAMP
 
 
Hamilton Camp  (30 October 1934 – 2 October 2005) was a singer-songwriter, actor and voice actor.  Camp’s debut as a folk singer was at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960; and his first recording, with Bob Gibson, was Bob Gibson & Bob Camp at the Gate of Horn, from 1961.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
The first song on the Simon and Garfunkel album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. is “You Can Tell the World”, a gospel song that had been written and performed by Gibson & Camp.  At that time, the latter gentleman was known as Bob Camp; he later took the name Hamid Hamilton Camp and also Hamilton Camp.  When I first encountered him, Hamilton Camp was in a supporting role on one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, He & She.  The show starred Richard Benjamin (as a cartoonist) and Paula Prentiss (as a social worker) as a married couple; they have one of the longest lived marriages in Hollywood (52 years and counting).  One of the Benjamin character’s cartoons had become the basis of a television show; the perfectly cast Jack Cassidy co-starred as the egomaniacal actor who played “Jetman” on that show.  Hamilton Camp played the folksy handyman for the apartment building where the couple lived, and the cast also featured Kenneth Mars as a firefighter who often walked into their apartment via a plank that he extended from the firehouse into a window in their apartment.  

 

I didn’t know that Hamilton Camp was also a folksinger until I got to college and discovered that his 1964 album Paths of Victory was a favorite album of the College Republican crowd that I began running with.  For some reason, they considered it to be the perfect album to play if you were really depressed; for myself, I loved Paths of Victory because it included covers of seven – count them, seven – Bob Dylan songs, most of which were unfamiliar to me.  The album also includes Camp’s best known song, “Pride of Man”, later covered by Quicksilver Messenger Service and Gordon Lightfoot.  I have found several other Hamilton Camp albums over the years, but never that one, so I guess I am going to have to break down and order it sometime.  Actually I have always loved “the hunt” and rarely order a particular album, even one as beloved as this one. 

 

(June 2013/2)
 
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Last edited: March 22, 2021