Can You Guess the Lyric Based on Terrible Microsoft Paint Art?

Song lyric #1

Song lyric #2

Okay, so here's how this works. I took two lyrics -- not titles, mind you but lyrics -- from famous songs and then illustrated them as crudely as possible in Microsoft Paint. Your job is to try to ID either of the songs based on the drawings. Your only hint is that both of these songs are used in the movie The Big Lebowski, though they may not necessarily be on the soundtrack album. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Anyway, post your guesses (if you have them) in the comment section below this article. "And report back to us as soon as it's done."

Aaaaaaaaand..... GO!

Rod McKuen was a childhood hero of mine... only I didn't know it

Man with a turtleneck: Rod McKuen on the cover of one of his many, many, many albums.

Rod McKuen died this week at the age of 81. He is mostly remembered as the creator of very popular, very corny poetry that was loved by the general public in the 1960s and 1970s but mocked and hated by literary critics. As a songwriter, his tunes were covered by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Madonna. But he's best known for Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun," a maudlin but catchy tune about death that occasionally turns up on lists of the worst and most detested hit songs of all time. (Once, on a long car trip, that song came on the radio, and I improvised my own alternate lyrics: "We had joy, we had fun, we had fingers up our bums.")

John Waters made sure to include McKuen's name in his article "Hatchet Piece (101 Things I Hate)." In its obituary, NPR somewhat uncharitably called Rod McKuen "the cheeseburger to poetry's haute cuisine." Clearly, for such a gentle and easygoing guy, McKuen attracted a lot of vitriol. Personally, I don't really care one way or the other about McKuen's hippy dippy poetry. It has had no real effect on my life, and if others have derived comfort from his words, well, more power to 'em. What I learned as an adult, however, is that Rod wrote and recorded two of my favorite songs of all time. And they were on opposite sides of the same 45 RPM record, no less!

I've written about this before, but my real introduction to popular music came through a stack of very worn-out vinyl records my mother had owned as a child. Her own parents had operated some bars and restaurants in northern Michigan, and she got the records from the jukeboxes when her folks were done with them. Those same 45s were eventually passed down to me and my sister. I still have them -- or most of them (kids are tough on records) -- neatly alphabetized in a shoebox in my bedroom closet.

Anyway, one of my favorite platters was a novelty number from 1959 called "The Mummy," credited to "Bob McFadden and Dor." McFadden (1923-2000) was a cartoon voice man. You may know him as Snarf from Thundercats. Dor, naturally, was the backwards-running pseudonym of Rod McKuen. "The Mummy" is a weird damn record -- not quite a song, not exactly a skit. McFadden plays a meek, neurotic mummy ("I was born one-thousand, nine-hundred, and fifty-nine years ago!") who terrifies everyone he meets... until he encounters McKuen, who portrays an unflappable and utterly unimpressed beatnik. I can still recite every word of their strangely low-key conversation. ("Aren't you afraid of me? Aren't you gonna scream?!" "Oh, yeah. Like, help.") In retrospect, this record also serves as a snapshot to late-'50s culture, with references to Dave Brubeck, George Shearing, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb."



The flip side of "The Mummy" is maybe even better. It's called "The Beat Generation," and it's a musical manifesto for beatniks everywhere. Like the A-side, it's written by Rod McKuen and credited to Bob McFadden and Dor, but this time I can't hear McFadden anywhere. It's all Rod, man. I honestly don't know how sincere this song is. For all I know, it's meant as satire, intentionally playing up every negative stereotype about beatniks in order to exploit "square" people's fears about them. But when I was a kid, I took it 100% literally, that's for sure.

When I was four or five, this song seemed very adult to me and more than a little dangerous. Suave, confident McKuen coolly expresses disdain for everything Americans are supposed to want: a wife, a nice house, and a good nine-to-five job. I still don't want any of that stuff either, and maybe this record is to blame for my lack of material success. I certainly listened to "The Beat Generation" enough during my formative years to have it permanently affect my thinking. Give it a listen and make up your own mind.

One Song at a Time: 'Sweet Sixteen' by Big Joe Turner

He lived up to his name: Big Joe Turner, the Boss of the Blues.

A good purchase.

The wonderful thing about greatest hits records is that you generally purchase 'em for the two or three songs you know really well, but they can point you in the direction of some other just-as-essential tracks you never would have known about otherwise. 

Case in point: Big Joe Turner's Greatest Hits. I purchased a copy of this compilation CD at a very decent (and probably long, long gone) used record store in Joliet, IL about twelve years ago. I'd just rewatched Clue and had "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" rattling and rolling around in my head that day, and the disc was only a couple of bucks. What the hey? That, my friends, was a good purchase. 

Big Joe Turner stands out from the other early pioneers of rock & roll. For one thing, he was about twenty years older than most of them. Born in 1911, he would have been in his forties by the time he became a national star, crooning for the kiddies. "The Boss of the Blues," they called him. He kept on performing until the 1980s, when he finally died at age 74 in 1985. (So weird to think he could have seen Back to the Future.) A thick-necked, broad-shouldered mountain of a man with a voice to match, Turner had been a bouncer in his younger days and looked like he could still whoop your ass between songs. 

He's the exact opposite of most of the male pop stars of the 2010s, who tend to be skinny, androgynous, "sensitive" white boys with high, thin, squeaky voices. I'm referring to the Biebers, Sheerans, Timberlakes, Smiths, Levines, and Styleses of the world. All those banty roosters put together wouldn't equal one Big Joe Turner.

 Anyway, one of Big Joe's less-remembered yet completely captivating hits is a slow blues lament from 1952 called "Sweet Sixteen." It was written by, of all people, recording industry super-mogul Ahmet Ertegun, who would go on to be (according to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) "one of the most significant figures in the modern recording industry." Ahmet had co-founded Atlantic Records just five years previously. Frank Zappa named one of his kids after this dude, if that's any indication.

As I see it, there are three stars on "Sweet Sixteen": singer Big Joe Turner, songwriter Ahmet Ertegun (who is slyly credited as "Nugetre" on the label), and pianist and orchestra leader Vann "Piano Man" Walls (1918-1999). It is Walls we first hear on the record: a few pretty, sad, isolated chords which, to me, sound like the musical equivalent of gentle falling snowflakes. Then, he hits us with the powerful triplets we expect to hear from piano-based blues of this vintage, accompanied by mournful, sympathetic saxophones. 

After a few bars, Big Joe himself steps up to the microphone to tell us, as slowly as possible, about his failed relationship with an impressionable, restless younger woman: "When I first met you, baby/You were just sweet sixteen/You just left your home, baby/Sweetest thing I've ever seen." Later in the song, Joe lets us know his ex-paramour was a runaway. "Now," he says, "you're gonna run away from me, too." 

When I think about the couple in this song, I always think about the relationship between gangster Odell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) and naive young "country girl" Sheronda (LisaGay Hamilton) in Jackie Brown, except that the girl in this song seems to be a lot more impetuous and headstrong than the meek, misguided lass in the Tarantino film. The part of the song which really sticks with me, though, is when Big Joe Turner -- out of nowhere -- starts telling us about his family. "Well, my brother, he's in Korea/And my sister, down in New Orleans/Well, my mother's up in Heaven/Lord, what's gonna happen to me?"

One song at a time: '26 Miles (Santa Catalina)'

A vintage postcard for California's "island of romance."

I'm bad at winter. I'll admit it.

Today is the winter solstice, and that fact depresses the ever-loving hell out of me. I've lived in the Midwest all my life: the first two-thirds in Michigan, the last third here in Illinois. The total time I've spent outside the Midwest adds up to maybe a month, a month and a half at the most.

And yet I've never gotten used to the climate here. I feel like the misfit polar bear in that joke Reese Witherspoon told on Saturday Night Live once. Winter and I are simply incompatible.

Driving in snow and/or ice is highly stressful for me. I swear, each car trip in such weather takes a year off my life. As a pedestrian, I've slipped and fallen -- badly -- at least once each winter for as far back as I can remember.

My body absolutely turns traitor during the cold weather months. I get windburned so easily, and my body is always covered with various painful rashes and blisters during the winter, oftentimes in embarrassing and hard-to-reach areas. Before I even leave home in the morning, I have to slather sticky, oily Vaseline on my legs and torso. Yuck. Sinuses? Forget about it. You've heard of Can't Stop the Music? Well, this is Can't Stop the Mucous.

Furthermore, that old reliable seasonal affective disorder kicks in hard sometime during January, and I spend several consecutive months cooped up indoors, gorging on snack food and getting next to zero exercise. No doubt about it, winter takes a serious toll on your humble blogger. Each year, I fantasize about living somewhere more habitable, but I cannot imagine the circumstances under which that might happen.

The Four Preps in their element.

As you might expect, I take refuge from winter in fantasy. Music helps me do that sometimes. I'm always a sucker for songs about warm-sounding, far-away places.

One of my favorite examples of such a song is the delightful but somewhat forgotten 1957 smash, "26 Miles (Santa Catalina)" by the Four Preps. I found this song in a really roundabout way. Albert Brooks briefly parodied "26 Miles" as part of his "Rewriting the National Anthem" bit from the 1970s. That routine is included on Albert's 1973 LP, Comedy Minus One, and I found the title of the original song credited in the liner notes.

The Four Preps were one of those well-scrubbed pop vocal groups that flourished in the mid-to-late 1950s, alongside the Ames Brothers, the Lettermen, the Four Aces, the Four Freshmen, the Four Lads, and the Crew Cuts. Acts like these were a gentler, more polite alternative to the raucous rock, R&B, and doo wop sounds of the era. The British Invasion finally made these non-rock acts obsolete in the 1960s, and now it's a chapter of music history we mostly try to pretend never happened.

I actually like this stuff, even though it's possibly the squarest, corniest, whitest, and least cool music to hit the charts in the last sixty years. (The Crew Cuts in particular were infamous for taking R&B songs originally by black artists and doing sanitized white cover versions.) Perhaps the definitive spoof of this type of music was found on SCTV with its 5 Neat Guys commercials, which showed a quintet of sad, middle-aged men squeezing into their old sweaters from the 1950s and crooning about egg salad sandwiches and other hopelessly Caucasian topics.

The Four Preps were one of the more innovative of these groups, and "26 Miles (Santa Catalina)" is actually a little gem of a pop tune whose influence on Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys is immediately apparent at first listen. The Los Angeles Times not long ago ran a great, informative article about how the song came to be. Among other tidbits, you'll learn that one of the Four Preps was TV producer Glen A. Larson (of Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider fame), who just passed away in November 2014.

What's key about the song is that it was written by someone who had never actually been to Santa Catalina Island off the coast of California. The song, then, is the guy's dream of what the island must be like. He imagines it as a lush tropical paradise just crawling with beautiful, available women.

And he never actually gets to the island during the song either. It's so close -- just twenty-six miles away -- and yet he can't get there. "So near, yet far," as the lyrics go. That's exactly how I feel during the winter sometimes. I think "26 Miles" will be in heavy rotation for me until next May or so.

One Song at a Time: "Love Me, Please Love Me"

French pop star Michel Polnareff sings his Frenchie heart out.

The song: "Love Me, Please Love Me"

Artist: Michel Polnareff

Released: 1966

Elvis Presley had at least two major hit singles in 1956 that were direct, unambiguous requests for love. 

"Love Me Tender," which takes its melody from an old folk tune called "Aura Lee," is a swaggering seduction routine set to music. It's audio foreplay, a sexual aperitif etched into wax. The guy in the song is a Lothario type, sweet-talking some innocent girl right out of her poodle skirt. The lyrics are G-rated ("You have made my life complete, and I love you so") and ostensibly wholesome, but you can tell why this guy made parents nervous back then. What did he mean by "all my dreams fulfill?" What kind of dreams did he have in mind? 

The King had another one that same year just called "Love Me," which I like even better. It's supposed to be about a desperate guy groveling at the feet of a cold-hearted woman. ("Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel, but love me!") But Elvis wasn't really the desperate, groveling type, so the song comes off as kinky and masochistic instead. You get the impression that the guy in the song gets off on the rough treatment he receives from this dame. Topping from the bottom, you might say.

A decade later, over in France, a moody, floppy-haired singer named Michel Polnareff had a #1 hit with his own plea for love, "Love Me, Please Love Me." It's just about the most pathetic I've ever heard someone sound on record, and I love it. Most of the lyrics are in French, but you don't really need a translation to get the gist of it. Not when poor Michel is howling in falsetto like a mournful hound dog.

This song demonstrates a level of vulnerability that Elvis Presley never would have been comfortable with. From what I can glean of his delightfully bizarre and eventful Wikipedia entry, Michel was just as troubled in real life as he sounds on this record. You can hear his genuine sorrow in every throbbing triplet he pounds out on the piano. 

I can just imagine some heartsick Frenchman playing this record over and over again, using his last bit of strength to life the tone arm on his vintage record player. Whenever I want to wallow in misery (which is basically all the time), "Love Me, Please Love Me" is my go-to song.

Name That Tune: Six more songs you didn't know you knew

Tom Kennedy hosted the 1970s version of Name That Tune.

One of the stated goals of this blog has been to give its readers exactly what they want, and I've noticed that among the most consistently popular articles in the blog's history is this piece about tough-to-identify songs. It seems to generate traffic every month, and since this happens to be a particular interest of mine, I am more than happy to bring you a sequel. I once thought about devoting this entire blog to the issue of "song identification," but instead I decided to limit it to these occasional updates. Hopefully, you'll find this one interesting and informative.

"But hey," as Marty DiBergi (aka Rob Reiner) once memorably declared, "enough of my yakkin'! Whaddaya say? Let's boogie!"

1. "Hearts and Flowers"

Bugs Bunny feigns death.

This maudlin melody (the famous part kicks in at 0:19), written in 1893 by Theodore Moses-Tobani and based on a melody from Hungarian composer Alphons Czibulka, has an extremely specific function in popular culture: mock sympathy. 

It is used frequently in cartoons, especially Looney Tunes, where it was used to underscore those "Ya got me, doc!" moments when Bugs Bunny pretended to be shot. But it also turns up sometimes in live-action comedies, such as A Christmas Story, during the sequence when Ralphie imagines himself as a blind beggar.

It's even heard occasionally in real life, where it's used to belittle someone else's misfortune or imply that a person is overstating the nature of a supposed "tragedy." When people do that "world's smallest violin" joke by rubbing their thumb and index finger together, this is likely the melody they will hum in accompaniment. Modern listeners may have the mistaken impression that "Hearts and Flowers" was used frequently in silent films, but this does not seem to have been the case.

2. "Hernando's Hideaway"

Billy Crystal as "Fernando."

I said in the last article that if people knew just one piece of tango music, it's "La Cumparsita." If they know two, the second is likely "Hernando's Hideaway." (The part you know starts at 0:45.) Ironically, the latter is not an authentic South American tango at all, but rather a Broadway showtune written by Jerry Ross and Richard Adler for the 1954 musical The Pajama Game. "Hernando's Hideaway," which has words but is often performed as an instrumental, has been recorded by a whole host of artists from Ella Fitzgerald and Mantovani to Homer & Jethro and the Everly Brothers.

The version I like best is by a 1960s guitar-rock outfit called The Ventures, the group behind "Walk Don't Run" and other hits. And, yes, this song did provide the inspiration for "Fernando's Hideaway," a popular recurring skit on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1980s, featuring Billy Crystal as a silver-haired Latin talk show host modeled after Fernando Lamas. This sketch, which used "Hernando's Hideaway" as its theme, introduced Crystal's famous catchphrase, "You look marvelous!"

3. Minuet from String Quartet in E Major, Op. 11 No. 5

Krusty with typical snob.

This minuet, composed in 1771 by Luigi Boccherini, is another piece of music with a very particular cultural connotation. Specifically, it evokes the stuffy, old-fashioned gentility of the moneyed upper class. For whatever reason, this particular piece of music has become the anthem of the snobs in countless "slobs vs. snobs" comedies.

In movies, you'll hear it at fancy restaurants, exclusive country clubs, and refined cocktail parties. It doesn't represent sophistication so much as it represents a silly parody of sophistication. Very often when you hear this tune, an uncouth buffoon is about to show up and spoil the rich folks' tranquility with his crude language and gross behavior, causing a gray-haired matron to put her hand to her chest and declare, "Well, I never!"

Because of this music's sissified nature, furthermore, it is often used by comedians in a sarcastic or ironic way, i.e. the coda to "Heavy Duty" by Spinal Tap. Elsewhere, this music turns up in Family Guy, Date Movie, Animaniacs, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Witless Protection with Larry the Cable Guy, always used in pretty much the same way. Sorry, Luigi.

4. "Chicken Reel"

The sheet music.

You might not even think of "Chicken Reel" as being a song or guessed that it was ever written by anyone. It's so deeply ingrained in our culture as a signifier of rural life in general and farming in particular that we may not even notice it. But, yes, it was written by Joseph M. Daly in 1910 as a reel, i.e. a two-step folk dance which had originated in Scotland but had traversed the Atlantic and found favor in America and Canada. "Chicken Reel," then, was the 1910 equivalent of what we'd today call a club banger. This was a tune designed to get people out on the dance floor.

This particular reel, as you might guess from the title, was meant to imitate the sound of chickens clucking in a barnyard. It was given lyrics by Joseph Mittenthal in 1911 and has been covered and rearranged many times over the last century, including versions by Leroy Anderson and Les Paul. Its real legacy, though, lies in innumerable cartoons, movies, and commercials where its presence instantly suggests we are "down on the farm." You'll hear it in A Christmas Story in scenes involving the hound dogs owned by the Parkers' "hillbilly neighbors," the Bumpasses.

5. "Sleep Walk"

Santo and Johnny.

"Sleep Walk" was memorably used in the 1987 film La Bamba. So memorably used, in fact, that people mistakenly believe it was recorded by that film's subject, the late Ritchie Valens. It wasn't. "Sleep Walk" -- and, officially, the title is two separate words -- was instead the creation of an Italian-American brother act called Santo & Johnny, who took the dreamy, otherworldly tune to #1 in 1959. Originally called "Deep Sleep," it was the slowed-down simplification of a jazz standard called "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise." The brothers wrote a set of lyrics for the famous melody, which Besty Brye included in her cover, but their hit version was an instrumental. That's why the title of this tune is not as well known as it ought to be. I can't imagine how many people have bothered record store clerks over the years by singing or humming this song because they didn't know the name.

Santo, the innovator of the family, played the melodic line on the steel guitar, while brother Johnny accompanied him on a standard electric guitar. They made the Top 40 just once more with a similar-sounding follow-up called "Teardrop." Santo's retired now, but Johnny still tours with a new band. "Sleep Walk," meanwhile, has been covered by axemen ranging from Brian Setzer to Carlos Santana.

6. "Dance of the Knights" (or "Montagues and Capulets")

A smelly ad.

One of the most sinister, foreboding pieces of music I have ever heard, "Dance of the Knights" or "Montagues and Capulets" was written in 1935 by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev for his popular ballet, Romeo and Juliet. But Sergei didn't write that famous fantasy overture about Shakespeare's doomed couple. That was Tchaikovsky about 65 years earlier. And he didn't write the couple's hit love theme either. That was Henry Mancini about 34 years later. Prokofiev's famous piece comes from Act I, Scene 2 of his ballet and was intended to create an ominous mood during a scene in which it serves as the somber accompaniment to a dance by Juliet's family. The creepy but catchy tune has been adapted by many rock bands, ranging from Iron Maiden to the Smiths, which is one hell of a range. In England, it's the theme music for The Apprentice, and it's been used to sell everything from Egoiste perfume to the movie Caligula. I'm sure that's not what Sergei would have intended or wanted for this particular piece, but that's the way the historical cookie crumbled, so to speak.

So there you have it! Six more musical mysteries solved. If you'd like to see more articles of this type, please let me know in the comments section below. Believe me, I have a bunch of 'em! And I'm open to requests, too.  Don't be shy! Speak right up!

Why that "Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" song gave me nightmares

Brian Hyland and the song completely misinterpreted as a kid.

You know which song scared the hell out of me as a kid? "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini." This will sound ridiculous, I realize. How could anyone be frightened by this totally innocuous, slightly risque 1960 novelty number about a young woman who comes to regret her choice in swimwear? Answer: because I was a kid at the time and kids' minds work in weird ways.

I'm not sure how exactly I heard this song at first, but I'm guessing it was because my mother had a 45 of it in her collection. While the rest of the world heard a fun little bubblegum pop tune about good times at the beach, I heard a song about a girl freezing to death in the ocean. The fact that the song was so light and upbeat only made it more horrifying: not only was the singer totally unconcerned about the girl, but he was actually making fun of her with this record.

Here are the lyrics that bothered me so much back then. (To recap the "plot" of song to this point, a young woman has come to the beach wearing the rather immodest garment of the title. Concealing her shame with a blanket, the damsel at first timidly progressed from the locker room to the shore. Now, having shed the blanket, she has secluded herself in the water and seems to be suffering from hypothermia.)

HYLAND: 
Now she's afraid to come out of the water
And I wonder what she's gonna do.
Now she's afraid to come out of the water
And the poor little girl's turning blue.

FEMALE VOCALIST:
Two, three, four, tell the people what she wore!

HYLAND & CHORUS:
It was an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini
That she wore for the first time today
An itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini
So in the water she wanted to stay

FEMALE BACKING VOCALISTS:
From the locker to the blanket!
From the blanket to the shore!
From the shore to the water!

HYLAND:
Guess there isn't any more!

The two lines that really bothered me were "The poor little girl's turning blue" and "Guess there isn't any more!" I cannot tell you the impact these lyrics had on my then-developing mind. Just so you know, this song no longer bothers me. I have it on my iPod, and it comes up in shuffle mode occasionally without causing me any stress. I can even now appreciate the cleverness of the lightly Latin arrangement, with the interplay between Brian Hyland and the sexy-sounding, flirtatious female vocalists -- not to mention the record's supreme use of cowbell. But when I was 4 or 5 years old, this song was a total nightmare to me. Kids, huh? Try to figure 'em out.

P.S. - This song was Hyland's first and biggest hit, and he was only 16 at the time. He'd go on to have other Top 40 smashes in the 1960s and 70s, including more serious tunes like "Sealed With a Kiss" and "Gypsy Woman," but none were bigger than "Bikini." So massive was the song's success that Hyland shamelessly copied himself with a sound-alike follow-up record that totally bombed. Here's that one. It's kinda fun, I guess.

Oh, Yahoo News, you big tease!

There's no new mail for me because I'd just cleared out my Inbox, not because I'm a social outcast.

Life's full of little disappointments, isn't it? Take Yahoo's obviously-Twitter-inspired "Trending Now" list which occupies the upper right hand corner of the site's homepage. The keywords on the list often look intriguing but lead to very dull topics. Today, for instance, I saw that the #1 item was the delightful-sounding "300-pound Romney." I figured that, following his unsuccessful bid for the presidency, Mitt Romney had locked himself in a wing of his mansion and was scarfing down Krispy Kremes and milkshakes by the truckload while playing "Make the World Go Away" on constant repeat. But, no, the topic turned out to be the fate of a 300-pound Romney campaign sign. Snoozers! Ah, well. Can't have everything. Where would you put it?

A couple new ZOMBY! cartoons, plus a musical tribute to Mr. Christopher Columbus!

First, let's get the unpleasantness out of the way...

Quite amusing, I'm sure. Now, then, let's continue.

Columbus: And he was handsome, too!

Today, October 8, is Columbus Day. That used to mean something in this country, friends. Well, no, that's not true. For as long as I can remember, Columbus Day has always been one of those B.S. holidays that postal workers and some lucky school kids had off but which no one ever really gave a second thought. I have the day off today myself, which is why I can lounge in bed and write this very post. But it's safe to say that in my lifetime, Christopher Columbus' legacy has completely disintegrated. We weren't exactly taught to love Chrissy C as kids, but we still regarded him as a more or less a hero. After all, he "discovered America." Except, of course, he didn't. Other explorers had been here before, and besides, the land was already, uh, occupied. All Columbus really brought to America was disease, genocide, and oppression. Nowadays, I'm told, Columbus is treated as a villain in our elementary schools. Kids now think of him as a one-man combination of Hitler and the Black Plague. And who knows? Maybe that's what he deserves. But what a bummer for Columbus! He made it as far as the 1990s with his reputation intact -- 500 years! -- only to see it come crashing down in the last two decades. I honestly didn't see that coming for the poor guy. In fact, if I were to name the two societal trends which have surprised me most during my time on this planet, I would say the widespread acceptance of tattoos and the complete downgrading of Christopher Columbus.

But what a run he had before that, huh? In order to commemorate the Columbus that was (but really wasn't), I'd like to present this selection of songs written in his honor.

First up is a song called, simply, "Christopher Columbus." It was written in the 1930s by Chu Berry and Andy Razaf and has been recorded by many jazz and pop performers over the years. It's often done as an instrumental,  which is how I first heard it (in a recording by Benny Goodman), but here it is with words. And even better, it's done by one of the seminal groups of the Twentieth Century, the Ink Spots, a vocal quartet whose sound was a major influence on R&B and rock. Give this one a chance. It's really catchy.



Next up is a selection by legendary American satirist, voice-over artist, and adman Stan Freberg. It's called "Christopher Columbus Discovers America," and it's a track from his landmark 1961 LP, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One: The Early Years, a musical in album form which covered our nation's history from 1492 to 1783 through songs and sketches. This portion includes one such song, "It's a Round Round World," performed by Freberg himself as Columbus and character actor Jesse White (the original Maytag repairman!) as King Ferdinand.



This next one is not so familiar to me. It's an educational song about Chris, and it's credited only to the mysterious Miss Healy. I'm  including it here because it's largely representative of the image I had of Columbus as a kid. You know, "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and all that jazz.



And last? Well, it's a song by Guy Mitchell (1927-1999), a Detroit-born crooner who was intensely popular and successful in the 1950s in the US and the UK but who is all but forgotten today. This particular number, titled simply "Christopher Columbus," hit #27 on the charts back in 1951. It was just one of his nine hit records that year, and Guy's monster hit ("Singing the Blues") was still five years away.



It didn't seem right to end the article without presenting the opposing side, so here to do just that is Winston Rodney, OD a.k.a. Burning Spear, legendary Jamaican reggae singer and Rastafarian evangelist. Since this song makes heavy use of Jamaican Patois, I have included a transcription of the lyrics beneath the clip. The refrain is unmistakable, though: Christopher Columbus is a damned blasted liar. We sometimes forget that Christopher Columbus is given credit for "discovering" Jamaica, too.

I and I old I know
I and I old I say
I and I reconsider
I and I see upfully that
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Yes Jah

He's saying that, he is the first one
who discover Jamaica
I and I say that,
What about the Arawak Indians and the few Black man
Who were around here, before him
The Indians couldn't hang on no longer
Here comes first Black man and woman and children,
In a Jam Down Land ya
A whole heap of mix up and mix up
A whole heap a ben up, ben up,
We have fi straighten out,
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Yes Jah

What a long way from home
I and I longing to go home
Within a Red, Green, and Gold Robe
Come on Twelve Tribe of Israel
Come on Twelve Tribe of Israel
Out a Jam Down land ya
A whole heap of mix up mix up
A whole heap a ben up, ben up,
Come on Twelve Tribe of Israel
Come on Twelve Tribe of Israel
Out a Jam Down land ya  Yes, Jah! 

Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Yes Jah, he is a liar
Yes Jah, he is a liar
Yes Jah, he is a liar
Columbus is a liar
Yes jah Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
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Name That Tune: 12 songs you didn't know you knew

Logo of the famous CBS game show Name That Tune.

If you've ever had the frustrating experience of trying to identify a song to which you don't know the lyrics -- or which may not even have lyrics -- here is the article for you. This is a collection of very familiar melodies with obscure or little-known titles, many or most of which I learned from old cartoons.

By the way, if you enjoy this article, THERE'S A SEQUEL RIGHT HERE.

1. "La Cumparsita"



The one piece of tango music you definitely know, "La Cumparsita" ("The Little Parade") has its origins in a melody composed in 1916 by Gerardo Matos Rodriguez as an Uruguayan carnival march. Argentinian bandleader Roberto Firpo was the one who turned it into a tango. Apparently, both Argentina and Uruguay have tried to claim the song, but in truth it belongs to the world.

2. "The Streets of Cairo" (a.k.a. "The Snake Charmer" or "The Poor Little Country Maid")



Ripped off by everyone from Steve Martin to Ke$ha.

3. "The Year of Jubilo" (a.k.a. "Kingdom Coming")



That one Civil War song that kinda sounds like "Dixie" but isn't "Dixie."

4. "The Arkansas Traveler"



Bet you thought this one was called "I'm Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee."

5. "Moonlight Serenade"



Marge Simpson's mom's favorite song.

6. "The Sailor's Hornpipe"



No, it didn't start life as Popeye's theme song.

7. "Sing, Sing, Sing"



Funny title for an instrumental, but I'll allow it.

8. "Pick Up the Pieces"



Want to instantly establish that your movie or TV show takes place in the 1970s? Play this song.

9. "Entry of the Gladiators"



Gladiators, clowns. Same difference.

10. "The Irish Washerwoman"



I used this once on Mail Order Zombie. If you can find that bit, it's probably my favorite thing I've ever done for the show.

11. "Soulful Strut"

A whole generation will know this as "That was a moment! That was a spring break moment! That's all there is!"

12. "Night Train"



Yup, it's the song playing in the background at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance in Back to the Future. Kinda raunchy for that environment.

Don't forget to check out the sequel to this article for more mystery songs!

A special song for St. Patrick's Day: "Oh Zombie Boy"

Hey out there, party people. I thought I'd switch things up on St. Pat's Day and give you an all-new version of an old Irish standard. Here then is "Oh, Zombie Boy."

And if you care to sing along, here are the lyrics...

Oh zombie boy
You've got the whole town screaming
And that's because
You died a week ago
Can it be you? Or am I only dreaming?
Indeed 'tis you
But how I just don't know

Was it some plague
Which gave you animation
or just some vague
Type of a voodoo spell
Perhaps a blaaaaaaaast
Of cosmic radiation
Or maybe they're just out of room
Down there in Hell

Oh, Danny Boyle
Might cast you as an extra
Apart from that
Don't think you'll get much work
Your skin's turned gray
And has a bumpy texture
And now you moan and stumble like a jerk

Don't eat my brains
My brains are not for eating
They're in my skull
And that's where they shall dwell
You zombie freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak
I think you should be leaving
Or I'll lobotomize you with a shotgun shell