Three Songs For Spring Break

No more posting till May 2 at 7:30 pm (it's already in the queue). Next week is going to be my own personal spring break. Not from work -- I've got a lot of that to do, in some ways more than ever -- but from daily posting. Wish I could say that I'll have descriptions of a long trip to report afterward, but that isn't going to happen. Maybe we'll make a few short expeditions to somewhere in greater Chicago. Or more likely to the deck in the back yard, if it's warm enough to sit around out there.

Till then, some songs for spring break. "Glow Worm," both in the original German version of 1902 ("Das Glühwürmchen") and the Johnny Mercer version later in the 20th century, speaks of young lovers wanting to sneak away into the woods. That could fit into a springtime mood. I had no idea until recently that there was an earlier version, but listening to the Mills Brothers not long ago, it occurred to me that I didn't understand quite all of the lyrics, so I looked them up, and found out about both versions.

The part that I never got was: "Glow little glow worm, turn the key on/ You are equipped with tail-light neon/ You got a cute (something, something)/ Which you can make both slow and faster."

According to "Perfessor Bill" and his lyric sheet, the missing words are: "You got a cute vest-pocket Mazda." A what? To me, Mazda is a car. Most people would say that now. But not to song listeners in the early 1950s, it turns out. It was a popular brand of light bulb once upon a time. The Wiki entry on this kind of light bulb is interesting, but doesn't quite answer the question of how the brand name so completely shifted from a GE product to a Japanese car, or why the name of a Zoroastrian divinity was picked for the bulb or the car, if that in fact happened. I always thought the car name was simply an Anglicization of Matsuda.

Dipping into the marvel that's still YouTube, I found a '50s performance of the song by the Mills Brothers on Nat Cole's show. Listen carefully for the Mazda. Man, we don't have lyricists like Johnny Mercer any more.

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Next, a song with a different vibe. It mentions summer, but never mind. Could be spring break too. Not that I ever had a spring break quite like in either of the video clips below. First, the original by the Strangeloves:

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That isn't the version I first heard. The Bow Wow Wow version of the song, and its video, were in heavy rotation in 1982 on MTV, back when that M stood for "music" rather than "moronic." It is in fact one of the first videos I ever remember seeing on that channel.

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Finally, I can't really argue this has anything to do with spring, but I know what I like. I was listening to Bob Edwards Weekend by chance a while ago when he interviewed the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Later I went to the great Internet jukebox to see what I could find of theirs, and came up with "Cornbread and Butterbeans," with the added benefit of learning about the WDVX Blue Plate Special, which seems like a wonderful use of radio.

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