LebVids.com © - Scatman John (Lebanon Song) - Lebanon Song</b></p> <p>Has anybody ever been to Lebanon?<br> Does anybody really care to go, at all?<br> Anybody want to go to Lebanon<br> Where you can read the writings on the wall?<br> <br> Do the caravans still ride across the sand<br> Or is the season causing everything sacred to fall?<br> Do the sages sing their chant throughout the land<br> Or has their song been silenced over the centuries, to all?<br> <br> Does the sun still kiss the earth in Lebanon?<br> Does the moonlight still reflect the sand at night?<br> Can a prophet still come out of Lebanon<br> Or has the thirst for profit changed the times?<br> <br> Do Phonecian spirits dance across the sand?<br> Do the cedar trees still standing next to the ocean still grow?<br> Do the sages sing their chant throughout the land<br> Or has their song been silenced?<br> <br> <br> <br> Does the temple still exist in Lebanon<br> Or have the winds of time been blowing hard, for all?<br> Does the mosque still sing the hymn of Lebanon<br> Reciting old inscriptions from the wall?<br> <br> Do the caravans now crawl across the sand<br> And is the season causing everyone sacred to cry?<br> Can the people of the land still hear the call<br> Or has the song been silenced over the centuries, to all? <br><br>John Paul Larkin, (March 13, 1942 — December 3, 1999), better known as Scatman John (sometimes credited as Scatman internationally), was a famous American stuttering jazz musician who created a unique fusion of scat singing and Euro Dance, best known for his 1994 hit "Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)". As he liked to say, this was a process of "turning my biggest problem into my biggest asset." He has sold millions of recordings world-wide and was also named "Best New Artist" in the Echo Awards in both Japan and Germany. He was a recipient of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Annie Glenn Award for outstanding service to the stuttering community and was inducted into the National Stuttering Association Hall of Fame. He died of lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles, California at the age of 57.<br> <br> Born in El Monte, California, he suffered from a severe stutter "since [he] started talking", which led to an emotionally traumatic childhood. Even at the peak of his success in 1995, journalists reported that during interviews he "hardly finishes a sentence without repeating the phrase at least six or seven times". At age 12 he began to learn piano, and was introduced to the art of scat singing at 14 through records by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, amongst others. The piano provided him with a means of artistic expression to compensate for his speech difficulties. He remarked in a 1996 interview that "playing piano gave me a way to speak... I hid behind the piano because I was scared of talking."<br> <br> He became a professional jazz pianist in the 1970s and '80s, playing many gigs in jazz clubs around Los Angeles. In 1986, he released the self-titled album John Larkin on the Transition label, copies of which are now extremely scarce. He claimed to have "hundreds of them lying around in [his] closet at home". Around this time alcoholism and drug addiction were also beginning to take a hold of his life. When fellow musician and friend Joe Farrell, who also had a drug problem, died in 1986, Larkin decided to beat his habits. He eventually did so, largely with the help of his new wife Judy, also a recovering alcoholic. "You have talent", she told him. "I'm going to make something out of you".<br> <br> <b><br> Birth of "Scatman John"</b><br> In 1990, he moved to Berlin, Germany in order to further his career. Appreciative of the jazz culture of the city, he continued playing gigs as a jazz pianist on cruise ships and in bars and clubs around Germany. It was here he made the decision to add singing to his act for the first time, inspired by the standing ovation he received for his rendition of the song "On the Sunny Side of the Street" at the end of an instrumental set. Around this time, his agent Manfred Zähringer from Iceberg Records in Denmark suggested that he combine his scat-singing with modern techno music and hip hop sounds. Larkin was skeptical but BMG Hamburg was receptive.<br> <br> Larkin was mainly scared that listeners would realize he stuttered, so Judy suggested that he talk about it directly in his music. Working with dance producers Ingo Kays and Tony Catania, he recorded the first single, "Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)", a song intended to inspire children who stuttered to overcome adversity. He adopted the new name and persona of Scatman John.<br> <br> <br> <b>International success</b><br> Scatman John's international smash hit album, Scatman's World.In 1995, at age 52, he became a worldwide star. Sales of his debut single were slow at first, but the song gradually took off to massive proportions, reaching #1 in nearly every country it was released in and selling over 6 million copies worldwide. "Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)" remains his biggest-selling and most well-known song to date and remained in the UK Top 10 for many weeks. He later followed up with the song "Scatman's World" entering the UK Singles chart #10, which met lesser but still notable success, selling a million copies and charting highly throughout Europe.<br> <br> Following the success of these two singles, he released his debut album, also entitled Scatman's World, a million-seller itself. He began a promotional and concert tour of Europe and Asia. "At an appearance I did in Spain, the kids screamed for five minutes straight, I couldn't start the song," he once recounted. While conducting promotional interviews for the album, he became so fluent that one journalist remarked that he hadn't heard Larkin stutter once and asked if he was merely using the stuttering community "as a gimmick to further [his] career". He was shocked to find himself for the first time ashamed of his fluency rather than his stutter.<br> source: wikipedia --
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