Wah-Wah-Wah-Wah-What a Gal

No excuse this week for not posting on Friday. Except I was enjoying Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness here in the vast New World. Actually, I was working a lot, as I must again today, which is only indirectly related to Happiness and much more connected to “Property,” which was originally the in the “Pop” position along with the “Snap” and “Crackle” of Life and Liberty in Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration, but edited out later.

The atmosphere might be cooking up tornados and other bad winds south of here, but in northern Illinois, Winter has let it be known that wants a few more turns around the track. It was much like February on Friday, like a dry, windy day in that sour month, especially out in a suburban parking lot where I found myself yesterday, with seemingly nothing between me and Saskatchewan.

Further discussion revealed that Yuriko watched The Wacky Races as a small child in Japan, which featured a couple of the same characters as Dastardly and Muttley. The latter cartoon might have also been shown too, though she doesn’t remember. The Japanese name for The Wacky Races cartoon was Chika-chika Mashin-mo Raisu. “Chika-chika” being something like chitty-chitty or bang-bang, “mo” an intensifier of “mashin” (machine, car), and “raisu” a two-syllable version of “race.” So my idiosyncratic translation would be the “Bang-Bang Supped-up Speedster Race,” which seems fitting.

I can’t say enough good about the Red Hot Jazz Archive, which I mentioned last week but actually discovered two or three years ago. When I have time, I troll for songs I’ve never heard before by groups with great names like Red McKenzie & His Mound City Blue Blowers, who happened to record a version of “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down & Write Myself a Letter” that I like just as much as Fats Waller’s.

Here’s a lyric from 1930, sung by Ben Pollack & His Orchestra, that I haven’t been able to decode. It might have slang meaning that evaporated long ago, like “kicking the gong around” supposedly refers to opium smoking in “Minnie the Moocher.” Anyway, I like it. It’s sung with great verve:

“There’s a wah-wah gal in Agua Caliente
What a wah-wah-wah-wah-what a gal
She’s got that thing I think you’ll like her plenty
What wah-wah-wah-wah-what a gal
You can have each hula hot bamboola baby
You can have each jolly hot tamale Sal
But the wah-wah gal in Agua Caliente
What a wah-wah-wah-wah-what a gal…”

Well, maybe it doesn’t need decoding.