Engaging in a Favorite Hobby

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There have been a number of discussions about earworms, "last song syndrome," or "getting a song stuck in your head." Generally, that doesn't happen to me. I have nearly 8,400 songs (eight thousand four hundred -- it's not a typo) on my iPod, so if I go into a grocery and they're playing "Africa" by Toto I just run out to the car and play it a dozen times on the way home. (And yes, I have done that with that song. It's one of my guilty pleasure songs.) I have an interesting variation on the ol' earworm plague. I call it "version searching." This usually involves older songs, where there have been numerous covers of a song. I spent a couple of hours trying to find a better version of "Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs" than the original (by Charlie Rich -- his wife, Margaret Ann, wrote it for him). While I found really good versions no one matched the power and emotion that Rich put into it (and for good reason: that song is deeply personal). Last night I engaged in another round of version searching. It started innocently enough, when I posted a Robert Palmer song on my Facebook wall. One thing led to another, and eventually the subject of Palmer's version of "Man Smart, Woman Smarter" came up. (That was Palmer's first charted single in th U.S., if you're interested...it was his first charted U.S. single even if you're not interested! ) I looked that song up, and discovered it was originally by a Jamaican calypso musician named "King Radio" (real name: Norman Span). I also saw that he had originally been responsible for the song "Matilda." And off I went. The first time I heard "Matilda" was -- go ahead and laugh -- on a Danny Davis & the Nashville Brass album in 1972 (Caribbean Cruise). By then I was outgrowing my interest in them (I was 11 and ready to move on to the real songs, not cheesy instrumental renditions played by a brass band with a banjo and steel guitar [and no, I'm not kidding, that's what the Nashville Brass was], although I did get to meet Danny Davis in 1979 when the Nashville Brass played in Jacksonville while I was stationed there. So I looked up other versions. I found Harry Belafonte's hit version from the mid-50's, but I found it annoying. Actually, I found dang near all of Belafonte's "calypso" music annoying with his phony "I'm from de island, mon" accent (he's from that long-lost Caribbean island, Harlem). (For those of you who think you don't have a clue who Harry Belafonte is, remember that next time you're at a baseball game and they play "Day-O!" and you sing "Day-O" back. That is Harry Belafonte's best-known song, "Banana Boat Song.") I even found King Radio's original. It didn't have that bouncy melody that later versions had (maybe lacking the influence of early rock and roll). The vocal version I ended up liking the most is by Sir Lancelot (ne Lancelot Pinard), who actually was an islander (from Trinidad and Tobago). Then there was Allan Sherman's parody, "My Zelda," which took a calypso song and turned it into a Jewish farce ("My Zelda, she took the money and ran with the tailor"). It was a fun three hours!