A couple of years ago a young girl started working in a shop I go to for my daily paper. Her name is Annie. She’s proud to be called Annie and loves her name. So I said her favourite song must be Annie’s Song. Well she’d never heard of it. I thought ok,it’s before her time.
She was quite excited though to know that there was a song called Annie’s Song and wanted to know what it was. For a bit of fun, I teased her and wouldn’t tell her.
About a week later she had a big beaming smile on her face. She had found the song. She loved it and had known it for quite some time but had no idea that it was called Annie’s Song. It made her day and we had a good laugh about it.
Well now it’s happened to me.
I switched the telly box on last night and found a Tina Turner concert.
There she was with her dancers slowly swinging their arms “this is how we do Proud Mary”
Oh, I thought, they’re always going on about Proud Mary in the community. What is it?
Well of course she launched into that huge hit that I love - Rolling On The River. At least that’s what I always thought it was called!!
Well I never knew that!
Am gob smacked !!
Is there a song or maybe lyrics that you thought you knew but it turns out you didn’t?
That’s lovely to hear, It always makes me smile when you introduce the younger generation to music you love and they totally appreciate it as well. My nephew is Autistic and after a few trips in Uncle Gary’s Wrangler has become a massive CCR fan amongst many other cracking bands.
He has even started collecting CCR memorabilia and already has a couple of collectable vinyl records framed.
When we were kids, growing up in Beirut, my Dad used to drive my three brothers and me from the suburbs to the American school in the city centre. It was a 9-seater Chevvy Kingswood station wagon and he invariably lit up a smelly cigar, which promptly filled the cab with acrid smog, bringing tears to our eyes. Once lit up, He would proceed to whistle the same tune, which I always presumed was a piece of classical music, as he enjoyed classical/opera and never listened to pop. Dad died when I was 18 and I never knew what the tune was from.
Fast forward half a century and my Irish father in-law, who’s visiting us starts humming the same tune. Yikes!
“What’s that song you’re humming?”
“Surely you know that’s The Rose of Tralee?!?”
II must have heard it (and blocked it out during the years I lived in Ireland), but it makes me smile when I think of my Danish Dad, whistling the Rose of Tralee after having courted and won the heart of his own Irish rose, whisking her away around the world.
Never did like that song though…
The first dwelling I ever owned (owed on) was in a small complex. I became acquainted with a fellow who lived in a unit a few down from mine. We spent many evenings sitting on his lounge floor shooting the breeze, drinking beer, and listening to music. When I left that city to move to Johannesburg, he gave me a mixed tape (seriously giving my age away), just the songs without any artists or titles.
A few years later, tape decks were a thing of the past, both as part of a HiFi system or in the car, replaced by CD players. I always wondered about one or two of those songs, wanted to acquire a CD.
One night my wife and I were having dinner at a colleague’s place. Over supper he had music playing in the background. And there is was, that song…Nothing Ever Happens by Del Amitri.
One day my strum a dum dum and sing along abilities may reach the level where I can add it to my repertoire.
Mixtapes
In the 80s every self-respecting teenager had a blank cassette tape primed in their radio-cassette player, so that when a good song came on the radio, you pressed play and record simultaneously. If you wanted ‘edgier’ music, you obviously had to make a snap decision in the first bar or two. More often than not, you’d find yourself disappointedly rewinding back in the hope of striking gold next time…
These were the heady days of post-punk new wave, Goth and I was mesmerized by the hypnotic dub poets from Jamaica. Linton Kwesi Johnson’s - Street 66 was (and still is) the epitome of cool for me
On that same tape I had an incomplete version a song that I knew the melody of and had snippets of lyrics from, but never heard again.
Since the birth of search engines in the 90s, I’ve checked every couple of years if I couldn’t identify the song, but to no avail. I was starting to wonder whether I had messed up the lyrics “Long time and I have no fun… the chalice in the palace… When this nonsense ever done?”
Last December the search engines finally hit the jackpot Mikey Smith, Long Time
The reason the searches never found it is because the lyrics were all written in Jamaican patois and thus ‘misspelled’ according to the Google-Beast. The album was called Mi Cyaan Believe It
Long time indeed
Cassette tapes eh!
Keep a pencil handy to wind them back in.
Snap the tabs off to stop my sister recording over my stuff.
Sellotape over the tab holes to record over something I bought but didn’t like!
@brianlarsen Brian, hearing about your Dad reminds me of Bruce the singing school bus driver. He would sing for the whole journey. I don’t remember his songs but he was good and his voice would easily reach the back of the bus. Sometimes he would be in a bit of a mood and didn’t sing but he soon sparked up when us kids shouted “C’mon Bruce, give us a song “ !
