The Mamas & the Papas' "Words of Love"

I'm currently listening to the first disc of The Mamas & the Papas' Gold album.  I have all of their albums, but I haven't transcribed any of their songs (I've become kind of obsessed with lyric transcription since last time I did this project), so I've been working on those as I listen, and I found something interesting about "Words of Love," from The Mamas & the Papas.

The first line is "Words of love, so soft and tender, won't win a girl's heart anymore," but every other instance of this line is missing the "so."  It becomes just "Words of love, soft and tender, won't win a girl's heart anymore."  In the same way that the adverb goes missing (so words that used to be "so soft and tender" are now only "soft and tender"), the "words of love" themselves aren't as effective as they used to be.

Mel Tormé's "A Foggy Day"

I'm still making my way through my ten-CD Gershwin set.  To-day, it's the penultimate disc, subtitled "Gershwin in Jazz."  I might have noticed something about Mel Tormé's "A Foggy Day," although I'm not quite sure about it.

At about 0:15, there's a woman's voice saying, "Cockles and mussels."  I think this is a reference to the folk song "Molly Malone," the chorus of which also involves "cockles and mussels."  Each verse of "Molly Malone" ends with some variation of "Through streets broad and narrow / Cryin', 'Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh,'" and the chorus is comprised of the same words:

'Alive, alive, oh
'Alive, alive, oh'
Cryin’, 'Cockles and mussels
'Alive, alive oh'

Leaving it at that, it seems to make sense, but the first line of "A Foggy Day" is "A foggy day in London town" (my emphasis), where "Molly Malone" is set in Ireland.  Since it's a folk song, there are different versions, but the two I know (one by the Countdown Singers and one by Pete Seeger) both start with something like "In Dublin's fair city / Where the girls are so pretty / I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone."  Were it not for that discrepancy of setting, I'd be more confident about this reference.

Ray LaMontagne's "Meg White"

This morning I also listened to Ray LaMontagne's Gossip in the Grain.  This is just a minor point (and I'm surprised I never noticed it earlier), but the "down"s in the recurring line "And watch the sun goin' down" is sung to two notes (F# to E), so - musically - it's descending just like the sun in the line.

Tim Buckley's "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain"

This morning I listened to Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello.  I think the last two or three times I listened to it, I felt that something was off in a verse of "I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain," and this morning I finally figured out what it is.  There's a slant rhyme in the first two lines of the third verse:

She says your scoundrel father flies with a dancer called the queen
And with her stolen cards he plays and laughs but never wins

"Queen" and "wins" don't really rhyme, and that bit of jarring seems to help illustrate the "never win[ning]."

When I transcribed this, I noticed something else too:  the grammar in "And with her stolen cards he plays" could be parsed in two different ways.  Taking it out of the inversion helps distinguish them.  It could be either "He plays with her stolen cards" [pronoun][verb][preposition][possessive adjective][adjective][object of the preposition] or "He plays stolen cards with her" [pronoun][verb][adjective][object][preposition][object of the preposition].

Ben Selvin and His Orchestra's "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!"

For the last week or so, I've been making my way through a 10-CD set of George Gershwin works.  To-day, it's disc 7, subtitled "The Later Broadway Musicals."  I'm actually not sure if I'd noticed this before or not, but I recognized a melodic phrase in "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!" (performed by Ben Selvin and His Orchestra) that's also in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  After the initial "Oh gee! Oh gosh! Oh joy! Oh golly!," there's "Oh gee I'm happy 'cause my baby loves me."  The melody to which it's sung is something like this:

The same phrase (a half step higher) is in the Rhapsody in Blue.  In the recording I have by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it's in the piano part at about 6:52.

I lookt up "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!" in the index of Edward Jablonski's Gershwin: A Biography (which I actually haven't read yet) and found that it was written for Rosalie in late 1927.  The Rhapsody in Blue is from 1924, so it seems like Gershwin re-used that melody from the Rhapsody as an introductory phrase in "Oh Gee! Oh Joy!"  Of course, there's also the possibility that this feature is unique to Selvin's version, but in either case, that melody came from the Rhapsody first.

Buddy Holly's "Oh, Boy!"

Earlier to-day I listened to a Buddy Holly compilation album (From the Original Master Tapes).  This is just a minor point, but I noticed that in "Oh, Boy!" the melody to which "fallin'" is sung (in the line "Stars appear, and the shadow is a-fallin'") descends.  It has its own fall in the phrase G# F# E.

Black Prairie's Fortune

I've been procrastinating on writing this, but when I listened to Black Prairie's Fortune a week ago, I found a couple instances where the lyrics reflect the melody they're sung to (or vice versa).  Since neither is that significant, I'm putting them in the same post.

"Let Me Know Your Heart"

The "away" in "Just throw it all away" is sung to four notes (E G E D), and the last three in particular (since there's a clear descent) help to portray the throwing away.

"Songs to Be Sung"

The "long" in "I know this road's been long" has a melisma both times it's sung (the line appears twice in the chorus).  First, it's just a descent from A to G (which might actually be more of a glissando than a melisma), but the second time, it's a slightly more involved phrase (A B A G).  Both help to represent the length though; it's as if multiple syllables are needed to measure it.

Beirut's "Cherbourg"

A couple days ago I listened to Beirut's The Flying Club Cup and noticed a couple things about the melody in the first phrase in "Cherbourg."  The lyrics are "And a fall from you is a long way down."  There's a melisma on "you" and between the two syllables, there's an interval of a fifth (A to D), which helps to musically represent the "fall."  The "long way down" is sung to a descending phrase (A, F#, E, E) in which the "way" has a F# to E melisma, so the "down-ness" is doubly emphasized.

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's "Take a Pebble"

Last night I listened to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's Fanfare: The 1997 World Tour.  This included the third version of "Take a Pebble" that I've listened to this year (the others were a live version on Birth of a Band: The Isle of Wight Festival and the studio version on Emerson, Lake, and Palmer), and I noticed something about it that I'd missed when I listened to those other versions (although it's present in them too).  I'd realized before that the piano parts after the lines "Just take a pebble" and "And cast it to the sea" sort of mirror those lyrics; the one after "Just take a pebble" ascends, and the one after "And cast it to the sea" descends.  Listening to it last night, I realized that - to some degree - the vocal melody for those lines does the same thing.  There's a bit of back-tracking in "Just take a pebble" (Eb Bb Bb Ab Bb), but generally, it ascends, as if picking something up, and "And cast it to the sea" has a descending melody (Bb Ab G F Eb C), like throwing something away.

Johnny Rivers' "Memphis"

I'm currently listening to a two-disc compilation album of Ricky Nelson.  The guitar part (doubled on harmonica) that's at the very beginning (and repeated in a few other sections) of his version of the Gershwins' "Summertime" sounded familiar to me.  I eventually placed it; I also know it from Johnny Rivers' version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis" (sometimes called "Memphis, Tennessee").

For the record, the part I'm talking about is E D B A G E.  I'm unsure, but Rivers might slide into that initial E from a D note (that's the way I've always played it, at least).

Nelson's version of "Summertime" is from 1962; Rivers' version of "Memphis" was released in May 1964, so it's possible that Rivers took the guitar part from Nelson's "Summertime."  That riff isn't in Chuck Berry's original, and I'd been wondering where it came from.  However, while the chronology works out, I'm not sure if this was the case; I don't know much about Johnny Rivers.

I feel it worth pointing out that the bass part from Nelson's "Summertime" was copied by Blues Magoos for their "(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet," so there's a precedent of copying from it.