The
Many Sides of Zebedy Colt
[
1929 - 2004 ]
Zebedy
Colt was born Edward Earle Marsh and had two parallel careers. As
Edward Earle, he was active in theatre, with several small Broadway
roles, and many more regional theatre credits. And he was a musician,
and that work included appearing on one of Ben Bagby's albums in 1967.
Those albums paid homage to the forgotten music of major composers
and there a whole series. The LP I found him on was "Ben Bagby's
Noel Coward Revisited," and on it he gave us the only full-song
version I know of for Coward's "Green Carnations." That
was originally was from "Bittersweet," in 1929, and that
made it a very early lyrically gay song.
The other side of Zebedy Colt attracted much more attention. Of interest
to me was his 1969 LP "I'll Sing For You," of mostly standards,
with those songs intended to be sung by women...but this time sung
man to man, and without any campy nuances, they were done...er, straight.
Included are the songs "The Man I Love" and "I'm in
Love With a Wonderful Guy." Now this was not the first time an
album of standards were done in this fashion...I give "Love Is
A Drag," from 1962, that honor. But it certainly was a very early
approach considering the young genre of "gay music."
By the mid-1970's, Colt had found an additional career, in straight
porn, with "The Story of Joanna," (1975) being his best
known title. This was at the same time he was appearing on Broadway,
under the name Edward Earle. His cast-mates in the Royal Shakespeare
Theatre Company were quite surprised when they went to the film and
recognized Zebedy as their fellow actor Edward.
Zebedy Colt's
"I'll Sing For You"
Ecco 101 and Tran
5001, 1969
two versions
were released...the blue one is the first pressing; date unknown for
the second
Click
for large scans of the LP covers
Click
titles to stream song or entire album
1
The Man I Love
2 I'm In Love With
A Wonderful Guy
3 Bill
4 A Sleepin' Bee
5 Michael*
6 Love For Sale
7 Bewitched
8 A New Year, A New
Love*
9 Lush Life
10 The Day To Say
Goodbye*
11 Somewhere
Stream the Entire
Album
* = written by Edward Earle (Zebedy Colt)
Below,
the VERY rare 45 released from the first LP, took me many years (until
May 2016) to track down a copy
and,
who would have thought there was a Second promo 45 released; it never
occurred to me until I found it (Dec 2016) on eBay
Clippings
"Gay"
covers, Dec 13, 1969 and April 13, 1970
Below,
collage of Colt's porn films
Plus,
PLUS!
See
this link for some incredible research on the early life of Edward
Earle...
and
also for the more porn side, this one!
But
Wait! The links directly above, from 2017, became a 2022 book...
by Roger Mason
Critique.....of
sorts....
the book is very short, 113 pages, and many of those
pages were full of images of play programs in which he
appeared, all through his life. So, I was able to read the
book in an hour. It gets deeper into his time in porn,
for what that's worth.