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Friends this side of the Atlantic may not be familar with the story of John Henry, but you can read about him on Wikipedia.  John Henry, the story goes, was a 'steel-driving man' whose prowess with the hammer was formidable.  

At one point, he took on a steam hammer, side-by-side, and won... but the effort also killed him.

It's not quite clear whether John Henry was ever anything more than a legend, but he has inspired statues, books, animations, compositions by Aaron Copland... and almost everybody seems to have recorded musical versions of the story, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Lonnie Denegan, Harry Belafonte, Woodie Guthrie... to name but a few.  For a brief version, here's Tennessee Ernie Ford, or I rather like the slightly longer story as recorded by Johnny Cash.

My friend Keshav, of course, asked ChatGPT to write a version, which also covers the threat posed to traditional skills by the coming of machines.

Not being well up on Italian hits of the early 70s, I only learned about this today, but I think it's great.

In 1972, the singer Adriano Celentano released a single called 'Prisencolinensinainciusol'. The words are gibberish, but intended to sound like someone singing in English with an American accent - or at least, how such a song sounds to a non-English speaker.

"Ever since I started singing", he once said, "I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang -- which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian -- I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."

[video width="400" height="300" mp4="/media/documents/acalentano.mp4"][/video]

(Here's a direct link - your browser may give you a better viewer than the player above.)

According to Wikipedia, the song was very popular, reaching the top 10 in several European countries, and, if you search, you can find a couple of other versions featuring Celentano, and tributes by numerous groups since. But this is my favourite; I certainly found my foot tapping to its beat... and I thought the choreography with mirrors was great!

All of this reminded me of a trip to Indonesia in my youth, where I ended up playing guitar with a group of guys who thought that Eric Clapton sang about "Snog, Snog, Snogging on Seventh Floor". (I wrote a post about this and about 'Mondegreens' a little while ago... let's see... gosh! - even that post was more than 16 years ago!)

Anyway, today I started down this particular rabbit-hole thanks to Charles Arthur pointing me at a Twitter thread containing some other linguistic gems, including this clip of Sid Caesar's performance at one of Bob Hope's birthday parties sometime in the 80s. A five-minute comedic performance with almost no words that can be understood by anybody:

(Link)

Wonderful stuff.

Rose suggested a better rhyme for the old carol:

Oh, the holly bears a berry as green as the grass
And Mary fled to Egypt on the back of an ass!

It works better if you pronounce 'grass' the way she does, rather than the way I do!

There are some tunes that are so catchy, they stick with you for ages.

I think I heard 'Everything stops for tea' about three or four decades ago, and probably only once. But the wonder of modern search engines is that they allow you to go back and renew your acquaintance with the things that formed those neural pathways all that time ago...

The song of most small birds just sounds like a stream of tweets and whistles to us, but if you slow them down, you can get a wonderful feel for what's going on.

Here's a nice compilation of lots of them. I like the little wren at the beginning, the (rather quiet) skylark at about 17:57 has a nice rhythm when slowed down, and the song thrush that follows him is quite fun. If other birds can pick out these details, you can imagine there might be quite a lot of communication going on.

The real star, however, is the Veery Thrush, whom you can hear in this slowed-down clip. He's the subject of the rather fun New Scientist article, which was what first caught my attention.

Now, I wonder if you sped up a clip of cows mooing, you could get a similar effect?

A quick recommendation of the dBpoweramp software, if, like me, you should find yourself ripping large numbers of CDs.

This afternoon, having an old show tune running though my head, I turned to my new Amazon Echo.

""Alexa, play Some Enchanted Evening.""

Short pause while it explores Spotify. Flashing lights. Music about to start...

""Some Enchanted Evening by Bob Dylan.""

Really?!! Bob Dylan?!! I was somewhat stunned. Partly because my image of the rebellious Dylan seemed about as far from 'Some Enchanted Evening' as I could imagine. And partly because there are many famous recordings of this song -- by great singers from Frank Sinatra to José Carreras to Bing Crosby to Perry Como to Ray Charles to Barbra Streisand to The Temptations to Willie Nelson to Harry Connick Jr. (to name a few), a significant number of which have been Top-10 hits, but I had no idea Bob Dylan had recorded it.

Well, it turns out that ignorance was bliss.

I'm an admirer of Bob Dylan, but in general I think the music world would have benefitted if somebody had persuaded him, early on, that he should stick to writing his own songs, and get somebody else to actually sing them. I grant that others may disagree.

For him to sing other people's songs, though, is an undeniable mistake, especially when it comes to the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein. I can imagine worse sounds that could emanate from my speakers, but they would probably have to involve Billy Bragg. If you doubt me, say ""Alexa, play Some Enchanted Evening"", perhaps as a cruel joke when visiting the house of a Spotify subscriber.

More seriously, I can't help wondering what the algorithm is behind the scenes that picks this version first, and can only be overridden by tacking something like 'by José Carreras' onto the end of your command. Is it because it's the most recent? Because all those recordings that spent weeks in the upper reaches of the charts don't appeal to Spotify's target audience? Or - a more worrying thought - perhaps it's selected personally for me! I guess I do have more Dylan in my collection than, say, Paul Robeson or Ray Charles. In which case, maybe it's my own fault...

Wow. She's still got it, hasn't she?

Thanks to Rory C-J for the link.

Jon Gomm demonstrates some real lateral thinking on how to use a guitar.