Hedge and Donna

 

 

California folk singer/songwriters Hedge and Donna Capers were what we called back in the '60s a "mixed couple."

They were popular in the music underground for a while. They even made it onto the Smothers Brothers Show in '69. (You'll either get how subversive that was or you won't.)

I have Hedge and Donna's six albums, released between '68 and '73, and dig them all. They have a hip, poppy musicality with some soulful Aretha-swing and moments of social topicality.

They hung out with the West Coast set -- Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh -- but never really broke into the big time. Was it a race thing? Undoubtedly in some places it was. Maybe they didn't have enough edge to be radical but too much edge to be pop. Dunno.

I'm not sure what happened to Hedge and Donna, but the dissolution of their marriage/partnership was evident when their last record was titled Capers and Carson (Donna's maiden name). Here one day and gone the next.

After the separation, Hedge continued his musical adventures in other arenas, including mental health therapy. I could not find any reports of his current whereabouts. He would be 81 years old now.

Donna died in 2019; she had been a social worker in LA, I believe. They were REAL hippies, yo.

George Spell -- The Trailblazer

 

 

 

 

For culture vultures of a certain age, George Spell's is a very familiar face, despite having a relatively brief film and television career.

In the '60s and early '70s, Spell, a Chicago native, was THE Black kid cast in serial television comedies and dramas. He made a few film appearances, too: Sidney Poitier's son in They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970) and The Organization (1971) and opposite Johnny Whittaker in The Biscuit Eater (1972).

A piano prodigy who performed with the Los Angeles Symphony as a teenager, Spell appeared in my favorite That Girl episode, The Defiant One (1969). He was a young boy named David, befriended by the soft-hearted Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas), who believes David, whom she caught stealing in a corner grocer, was impoverished and desperate.

She brings him home to her apartment and tries to get him help but eventually discovers David comes from a wealthy family on the Upper East Side. He weaves tales of woe to mess with people. The unstated implication is "mess with white people."

I like this episode a lot because -- aside from its message about racial assumptions and "liberal guilt" and its homage to the Poitier/Tony Curtis prison-escape film The Defiant Ones (1958) -- Spell is a warm character from a time when television was taking steps -- small and sometimes unsteady -- toward inclusion, if not full acceptance and equality. In a way, Spell was a trailblazer.

Spell, who neither married nor had children, always landed on his mark. I bought what he was doing, why he was in the role, what he meant to the story, and, even when I was young, what he meant to those of us in the audience who needed to see and hear him.

Spell's last acting credit was 40 years ago. He died in 2022, after a bought with cancer. He was 64.