Nobody's Child

You are tuned to The Zoo, the place where the deep cuts still get the long spin and the story behind the song gets the same respect as the guitar. This one is Nobody's Child, the Traveling Wilburys, and it did not come off either of the two proper Wilbury albums. It opened a charity record called Nobody's Child: Romanian Angel Appeal, out on Warner Bros. in July 1990, and if you only know the Wilburys from Handle With Care and End of the Line, you are missing the cut where the joke band put the jokes down and went to work.

The song itself is older than rock and roll radio. Cy Coben and Mel Foree wrote it, and Hank Snow cut it in 1949, a country weeper about a blind boy standing outside an orphanage while the couples walk past and pick somebody else. No mama's arms, no daddy's smile, nobody wants me. Lonnie Donegan later took it into the British skiffle clubs. And here is the piece of Dallas-to-Hamburg history that makes the Wilbury version feel like a circle closing. On June 24, 1961, in a Hamburg studio under producer Bert Kaempfert, the Beatles, still billed in that company as the Beat Brothers behind Tony Sheridan, recorded Nobody's Child in the same batch of sessions that gave the world My Bonnie. George Harrison had lived with that song since the Star-Club days. Nearly thirty years later he would have to phone a friend just to get the first verse back.

The Traveling Wilburys were already a happy accident by then. Warner Bros. had wanted a fresh B-side for This Is Love, off Harrison's Cloud Nine. George, Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison knocked out Handle With Care instead of a throwaway, named themselves after a studio gag about wilburys, the little errors you bury in the mix, and accidentally made the best supergroup record of the late eighties. Volume 1 arrived in October 1988 and took a Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. They never played a public concert. Roy Orbison, Lefty Wilbury, died on December 6, 1988, weeks after the first album. When they reconvened they skipped a number on purpose and called the follow-up Volume 3, because George wanted to confuse the buggers. The aliases stuck: Nelson Wilbury for Harrison, Otis for Lynne, Charlie T. Jr. for Petty, Lucky for Dylan.

Nobody's Child was the first thing they cut when those Volume 3 sessions opened, on April 27, 1990, in Bel Air. It was not on the session plan. Olivia Harrison had gone to Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu and seen the state orphanages, the rows of children and babies left behind by a regime that had forced up the birth rate and then abandoned the ones families could not feed. She founded the Romanian Angel Appeal in April 1990 with the other wives of the former Beatles, Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney and Barbara Bach. Dave Stewart had already written a fund-raising song called Lumiere, also known in some tellings alongside his track This Week. Olivia phoned George, who was in with the Wilburys, and asked for something that would pull attention and money toward those children. Dylan suggested Nobody's Child. Harrison could not remember the whole lyric. He called Joe Brown, got the first verse, and wrote a new second verse from what Olivia had described. In every town and village there are places just like this, with rows and rows of children and babies in their cribs. They have long since stopped their crying, as no one ever hears, and no one's there to notice them or take away their fears. Lead vocals passed around Dylan, Harrison, Petty and Lynne, two lines apiece, the fifth chair left empty. Harrison later said they did it very quick, inside about forty-eight hours of the phone call. Lynne's high harmony on the second chorus is the part that stays in the room after the track ends.

Warner put the single out on the Wilbury label on June 18, 1990, with Stewart's Lumiere on the flip. The twelve-inch and the CD added a live With a Little Help From My Friends by Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band. Derek Hayes directed a video built from animation and news footage of the children. The album followed on July 23 in Britain and July 24 in the States, Harrison compiling it so it would not turn into a George Harrison record. The opener is the Wilburys. After that you get Van Morrison's Wonderful Remark, Elton John and Bernie Taupin's Medicine Man, Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys, a Stevie Wonder track, Paul Simon, Ric Ocasek, Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, Eric Clapton, Duane Eddy with Harrison and Lynne and Jim Keltner on The Trembler, Guns N' Roses with the first release of Civil War, and Ringo. Harrison also played guitar on the Clapton and Duane Eddy cuts. Steve Winwood and Queen sent pieces that arrived too late to make the master. A Bruce Springsteen live track never came back. An approach to Michael Jackson got tangled in the fight over the Northern Songs catalogue. Harrison told BBC Radio 1 that the British public put up a million pounds in six weeks. Proceeds went to the foundation, which moved supplies and technicians into the orphanages.

The track later turned up as a bonus on the 2007 reissue of Volume 3, which is how a lot of Zoo listeners found it after the fact. It is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, credited to Coben and Foree even with Harrison's new verse, produced by the Wilburys with Harrison and Lynne at the board. It does not swing like Handle With Care and it does not grin like Wilbury Twist. It is four of the best singers of their generation passing a country orphan song around a microphone because a phone call from Bucharest asked them to. That is the Wilbury idea at its plainest. Not a tour, not a brand, just the right people in the room when the room needed a record.

If you want the rest of the catalog, the aliases, the polaroids and the timeline, the official home is travelingwilburys.com. The band keeps a page on Facebook, posts on Instagram, and runs the account @OfficialWilbury on X. Fans have built a deep file of session notes and questions over at thewilburys.com. And you are hearing it on The Zoo, listener-supported, commercial-free, the station that still plays the long version and tells you where it came from, at thezoorocks.com. Nobody's Child, the Traveling Wilburys, from Nobody's Child: Romanian Angel Appeal. Someday everybody gonna be a Wilbury. Right now, this one belongs to the kids the song was rewritten for.