Here are four videos of rather old records. I'm going to embed them here and you can listen to them and then I'll explain what they have in common. Or you can scroll down and read the explanation first. Your call. The first of these is "A Horse in Striped Pyjamas" performed by Eddie Arnold and his daughter JoAnn. It was released in 1956…
Next, we have "My Blue Heaven," recorded by Gene Austin in 1928…
Next up is "Mairzy Doats" by the Merry Macs in 1944…
And lastly, we have "Swinging on a Star," recorded in 1944 by Bing Crosby and the WIlliams Brothers Quartet…
Okay, so what's the deal with these songs? These are songs my mother sang to me — and sometimes, she played records of them — when I was four years old or so. My mother was not a particularly good singer but I think her mother had sung to her when she was four or thereabouts so she considered it a motherly duty. Actually, she may have sung three of them to me before I was four, then added "A Horse in Striped Pyjamas" to her repertoire when it came out.
I don't hear these songs very often these days but when I come across one, it reminds me of my mother. I remember how she sung them the right way, not the way Bing Crosby or Eddie Arnold or any of the folks who recorded them did. The way my mother sang them was the proper way and I don't care how many damned records Bing Crosby sold. She was better.
I remember being a few years older when I realized that "Marzy Doats" referred to the dining habits of female horses. And I remember some outrage when I saw the following Little Lulu cartoon on TV and found that they'd stolen one of my mother's songs…