Lullaby of Broadway

This song is so deeply embedded in the popular culture, and yet, I have no clear mental reproduction of the precise recording I'm summoning. The first appearance of the song was in the film Gold Diggers of 1935, a movie I've never seen. It's quite possible that the version I heard the most while growing up was by the Andrews Sisters, but I'm guessing I just know it from various homages in movies and TV.

Artist: Wini Shaw
Year: 1935
Rating: Warm

Young At Heart

Woke with this unmistakable melody this morning. A good reminder to us all to be young, and open, and view the world with fresh eyes every day.

Artist: Frank Sinatra
Year: 1953
Rating: Warm

I Get A Kick Out of You

It's strange to wake up with a song about the zing! and thrill! of love, and have no particular person come to mind. It's a blank, neutral feeling. Which is oddly refreshing.

Artist: Frank Sinatra (written by Cole Porter).
Year: 1934 (original); first recorded by Sinatra in 1953.
Rating: Warm

White Christmas

The first holiday tune to enter my brain this season. Even being Jewish, I couldn't avoid Christmas music growing up, and I don't think anyone in the U.S. could avoid hearing this particular song, given it's the best selling single of all time. I don't much care for the usual onslaught of holiday music on the radio and piped into every last hardware store and corner market, but I will admit that I'm fond of this song. In particular, the rising notes in the line "May your days be merry and bright" and the complementary descent of notes in "And may all your Christ--mases be white" is one of the most sublime melodies in pop music, delivered perfectly in that Bing baritone.

Artist: Bing Crosby and Martha Mears, written by Irving Berlin
Year: 1942
Rating: Warm as hot cocoa sprinkled with nutmeg

Jingle Jangle Jingle

Thinking about the sad but inevitable news of REM's breakup, I woke this morning with the term jangle pop in my head (examples here). This led to a playback loop of the above popular '40s country tune.

Here's to the boys from Athens as they go ridin' merrily along.

Artist: Kay Kyser and his Orchestra
Year: 1942
Rating: Warm

The Addams Family Theme

Maybe this is in my head 'cause I'm identifying with Thing at the moment. Or maybe it's random.

Artist: Written and composed by Vic Mizzy
Year:1964
Rating: Luke Hot

Note: Mizzy also wrote the theme to Green Acres. Classic!

August Wrap-Up

I've had a lot of songs in my head over the last few weeks, but haven't had time or sufficient mental focus to post them. A quick inventory of the backlog for August follows, with notes where I'm moved to write them:

Stacy's Mom by Fountains of Wayne arrived on my brain after hearing a review of the band's new album on NPR's Fresh Air. Aside from the inanity of this 2003 radio hit (a band's gotta have one to make the collective radar) I kind of dig them, and it occurs to me that this band is totally the American version of Sloan (not that that would mean anything to more than, like, two people reading this blog). Sadly, Sloan has no analogous annoying radio hit of their own (in the States).

David Duchovny by Bree Sharp (A rerun, last blogged on 8/31/09).

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, popularized by the Platters, came to me in a most ethereal way, a familiar tune I couldn't identify until looking up the fragments of lyrics I woke with one day. It seemed significant to me when I learned that the song originally appeared in an operetta called Roberta, which was my mom's name. When a lovely flame dies/Smoke gets in your eyes. The synchronistic throat lump supplied by the song's lyric shouldn't be lost on anyone reading who knows me. My mom died last year of complications of lung cancer. Smoke, indeed, gets in my eyes.

Stop Draggin' My Heart Around by Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty. Pretty typical sooze-fare, nothing noteworthy about this one.

Give Me Back My Man by the B-52s. I'm relating to Kate Pierson's plaintive wail, I'll give you fish/I'll give you candy/I'll give you everything I have in my hand!



And then there was a song snippet that entered my consciousness somewhere between dream state and waking that was a bit peculiar. At first, I thought it was the theme from the film Ordinary People, but when I looked for the music for the film on YouTube and heard Pachelbel's Canon in D major I had to probe a different area of my memory banks. Then it just hit me: this is the theme from The Incredible Hulk TV show, which I'm sure I hadn't seen in more than 25 years. The memory is indeed mysterious, and I wonder how I was able to make the leap between a classical composition from the 17th Century and a spare piano riff from 70's TV. The song may bear some similarity to the melancholy musical themes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I'm currently re-watching.

Song: Stacy's Mom
Artist: Fountains of Wayne
Year: 2003
Rating: Lukewarm

Song: David Duchovny
Artist: Bree Sharp
Year: 1999
Rating: Luke Hot

Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Artist: The Platters
Year: 1958 (originally recorded by Gertrude Niesen for the Operetta Roberta in 1933)
Rating: Warm

Song: Stop Draggin' My Heart Around
Artist: Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty
Year: 1981
Rating: Luke Hot

Song: Give Me Back My Man
Artist: The B-52s
Year: 1980
Rating: Hot!

Song: The Lonely Man Theme (from The Incredible Hulk television series)
Artist: Joe Harnell
Year: 1977
Rating: n/a

Under the Boardwalk

Haven't a clue why this song showed up today. Maybe feeling wistful about love, but certainly not in that New Relationship Energy way. Maybe I need a trip to Santa Cruz?

Artist: The Drifters
Year: 1964
Rating: Warm

To Love Somebody

Stick with this video til the end. Magnificent, heartbreaking performance.

Artist: Nina Simone
Year: 1969
Rating: Hot!

Note: I actually didn't know that this song was a Barry/Robin Gibb composition!

Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby

Artist: Louis Jordan
Year: 1944
Rating: Luke Hot

The Entertainer, Redux

Last in my head on May 23, 2010.

Artist: Scott Joplin
Year: 1902
Rating: Warm

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

This is exactly the sort of song lodged in the collective consciousness that makes writing this blog worthwhile! Why I woke up with it, I've no right idea. A look at the lyrics reveals a serious genderqueer narrative in the song that I'd never noticed before: not only is the girl described as "handsome" by the narrator (I know, not an uncommon description for a woman in those days) but at length, the daring young trapeze artist has purloined the singer's love away, trained her for the trapeze, made her "assume a masculine name" and by the last verse, she's wooing the girls in the audience who take her for the daring young man. Handsome, indeed!



It's possible (though I can't say for certain) that my first encounter with "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" was in the Popeye short from 1934, which of course I didn't see til I was a kid in the '70s, some 40-odd years later, and more than a century after the song was first published in 1867. If, in fact, my neuronal association with this song connects to Popeye, then perhaps this earworm manifested itself due to some references my pal Scott and I made several days ago to Popeye, the Robert Altman movie. Songs from said movie are also still stuck in my head from its debut thirty (gulp!) years ago. Music and memory: kind of awesome.

Artist (original): Gaston Lyle, Alfred Lee, George Leybourne
Year: 1867
Popularized: 1930s, various artists
Performed above by Henry Hall and His Orchestra, Len Berman on vocals, c. 1930s
Rating: Warm

Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee

Keep that pelvis far from me!

Artist: Stockard Channing, Didi Conn, Dinah Manoff and Jamie Donnelly
Year: 1978
Rating: Luke Hot

The Ballad of Davy Crockett

In my head 'cause I saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox a while back, and it's used in the opening credits. I can't find much info about this version of the song out there, but it's a resonant tune, lodged in the brains of many of us born in the States in the post-WWII era through maybe my generation. I wonder how many Gen Y'ers and younger know it.

Artist: The Wellingtons
Year: 1954 (original)
Rating: Warm

The Entertainer

One of those songs that is simply plucked out of the collective consciousness. I have no good reason for it to be in my head. I haven't seen The Sting recently (or ever, actually) and ice cream trucks are scarce in these parts.

Artist: Scott Joplin
Year: 1902
Rating: Warm

Down By The Old Mill Stream

This song accompanies fantasies of a love that will last til my girl's hair is silver. I'm in a wistful, melancholy mood this morning.

Written by: Tell Taylor
Artist: The Peerless Quartet
Year first recorded: 1910
Rating: Warm

Pomp and Circumstance/The Riddle Song

So, I got the graduation march, Pomp and Circumstance, in my head, specifically as heard in a movie which I thought was Animal House. I've searched for a graduation scene online, but I can't find it, and the song isn't listed as in use in the movie at imdb. Anyway, here's some amazing footage from 1931 of the original composer conducting the song at the opening of the Abbey Road studios in London.



Artist: Sir Edward Elgar
Year: c. 1905
Rating: I'll pass

The thought that the march appeared in Animal House inspired another song from the movie to get stuck, an old folk tune that I thought was called "I Gave My Love a Cherry" (actually called The Riddle Song) which was performed in the film by my mental soundtrack staple, 70s singer/songwriter Stephen Bishop. View cliphere

This then lead me to get another filmed version of the song in my head, from one of my most beloved movies, Little Darlings. Armand Assante, as Coach Callahan, sings it 'round the campfire.



(The song is at minute 9:10, the very end of the clip, just after one of Angel and Randy's failed attempts at teen coitus!)

Artist (original): Unknown, English traditional
Artist (covers): Stephen Bishop and Armand Assante
Year (original): c. 15th Century
Year (covers): 1978, 1980
Rating: Lukewarm

Can't Help Falling in Love

Elvis really ain't my king, but I do love the '70s caped-suit motif.

Artist: Elvis Presley
Year: 1961
Rating: Lukewarm

Six Degrees of Fish Heads

This is not a timely entry - the chain of events and songs-in-my-head described herein happened months ago, but I've been wrestling with how to present the tale. Unfortunately, I'm not skilled enough in web design to give you the presentation I had envisioned, which would have involved the linking of images in a flowchart to their relevant examples somewhere on the World Wide Web. Instead, please draw your attention to the two-dimensional flowchart below. Click on the image to enlarge it so's to maximize legibility.

Now in linear form, with links: A while back, a Facebook friend of mine, Lia, wrote on my wall to let me know that Del Shannon's "Runaway" was in her head. (I always appreciate hearing what songs are in your heads, dear readers!)



 The clavioline* bridge in "Runaway" led me to get the Lost in Space theme song stuck in my head. Well, one of the Lost in Space theme songs.** From there, I was inspired, while still on YouTube, to look up Billy Mumy, who played Will Robinson on Lost in Space. I'd heard at some point or other that he'd become a musician, in a career trajectory not unlike Brandon Cruz, another sixties child star who went on to front several irreverent punk bands. Some of you out there may have known this already, but in fact, Bill Mumy was one half of the art-wave/novelty duo Barnes & Barnes, most famous for this Dr. Demento staple:

 And there you have it. This, in sum, is how my friend Lia led me to get "Fish Heads" stuck in my head, and to make the realization, for the first time, that little Billy Mumy was responsible for it. If only I had mad web design skills and could have conveyed this convoluted story to you when it was still au courant. Shouts out to Lia!

Artist (Runaway): Dell Shannon Year: 1961
Rating: Warm
Artist (Lost In Space Theme): John Williams
Year: c. 1967
Rating: Warm
Artist (Fish Heads): Barnes & Barnes
Year: 1978
Rating: Luke Hot

* No, I did not know the name of this instrument until embarking on this tangential internet search
** The other Lost in Space theme song goes like this.

Singin' In the Rain

Yes, my unconscious soundtrack can sometimes be rather predictable and dependent upon obvious environmental factors. This clip from the 1952 movie is so sweet though; it's hard to resist. And here's a link to one of the early recordings of the song from 1929.

Artist: Gene Kelly
Year: 1952
Year: (original) c. 1927, written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown
Rating: Warm