TRACK #418:
Queen of Halloween by Bily Snel
Our next proclamation for the Queen comes from a male subject of the court, a one Mr. Bily Snel. And short of being a Monster Rap performed by a Lil Bow Wow in a witch hat, this is about as diametrically opposed to Acid’s Halloween Queen as we can get.
From that watershed year of Monster Rock, 1958, comes this rockabilly hit from a guy who never released another one after. There’s a b-side to this one called One Too Many Heads, which is hedging on a Monster song, but doesn’t take the full plunge. Other than that, Bily’s out.
Now, most folks with a lone record to their name don’t tend to have lots of information floating around the internet about them. That’s doubly true if the record in question is some random novelty song about a Halloween lady. Some will have a Wikipedia blurb maybe, or something scrawled on Rate Your Music perhaps, but little in the way of sourced, reliable information. Bily, on the other hand, has a very curious entry on a page called askART.com, because evidently, Bily was much better known as a painter than as a singer. 
Bily has a lot of mix-media pieces to his name, but largely his portfolio consist of clown illustrations like that one pictured here. He even published a book called My Musical Coloring Book in 1963, that had a clown on the cover. Guy liked clowns, I guess. Seriously. Type in “Bily Snel Painting” and you’re gonna get a ton of clowns.
Anyway, I said the entry was “curious” because, well, because it exists, but also because the information it presents is a little inconsistent. Being born in 1925, William Scott Snell it says, is listed as White on his 1943 draft card and in a 1930 and subsequent 1940 US census. They then proceed to present us with a photo that’s essentially Christoph Waltz and sure, why not. Here’s that.
Now, later on in his biography it suggests that Bily is black. Wait, what? Didn’t you just suggest his draft card and 2 different US Censuses identify him as White. Didn’t you show me a photo that looks like he’s from the East German All-Stars? I mean, one can not 100% assess a person’s race simply from photographs, sure, and certainly not from a single and very old photograph, but, am I crazy? The guy in this photo doesn’t seem even the slightest bit black to me.
Now, several other art outlets , auction or archive, claim Bily Snel is, in fact, an African American illustrator and the man responsible for the Queen of Halloween record. Ok, cool. But I have some questions for askART.com then.
Are there 2 Bily Snel’s being conflated together here? Is Bily Snel the painter of clowns the same Bily Snel that’s cutting this record? This seems like a real specific way to spell both Bily and Snel for there to be 2 different Bily Snel’s. Is Bily Snel, the singular, a white guy, or is he an African Amercian? Is this picture on askART actually him, or someone else? What the hell is going on here and who the hell’s got the right info about Bily?
Race is obviously of no concern around here, particularly when it comes to dropping one of the oldest Halloween Songs known to the playlist. I just got real confused when that askART biography claimed both races and then fed me a picture of the whitest looking dude I’ve ever seen.
Whatever race Bily is, he’ll forever be enshrined in our block of Hallo-Women for his trailblazing 1958 single Queen of Halloween.
