Saturday, November 24, 2012

Advanced instruction for watching On the Road: Slim Gaillard and Yip Roc Heresy

Not being familiar with Slim Gaillard's (in)famous song,* Yip Roc Heresy,** I was curious about it while watching On the Road and thought Daily Beat readers who haven't seen the movie yet might benefit from some advanced instruction.

From what I can piece together, Slim wrote this song about his time living in Detroit where an Armenian woman had taken him in and often cooked him Arabic food. The song, Yip Roc Heresy, is made up almost entirely of Arabic food names. "Yip roc" is actually "yabraq," stuffed grape leaves, and "heresy" is actually  "heressah," a sweet semolina dessert.

So when you watch Sal and the gang singing along with Slim in the movie, you'll now know what the hell they are saying.

You're welcome.



*Apparently, it was banned from at least one radio station.
** Lots of different spellings of this on-line.

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3 comments:

  1. Baltimore Colts fanNovember 25, 2012 at 8:55 AM

    Slim is The Man! Everyone is well-advised to check out all of his recordings, many which are nicely arranged on the Proper label.

    Apparently, BBC-TV put out a 4-part (?) series about Slim back in the 90s, anybody out there have a copy of it to share? (Just wondering ....)

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  2. MarkApril 22, 2014 at 7:29 AM

    This may be what you are looking for. Finally got around to uploading this video. If this is a four part series, I didn't know. This is the only one I had.
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=hbdGTqoOg8w

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  3. JuliaNovember 9, 2014 at 6:38 AM

    Looks like it was a 4-part series, few clips from other episodes at http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=slim%20gaillard#page=2 but I can't find any whole episodes there. Yet. Seems they're slowly adding to online archive.

    ReplyDelete