That’s a dumb thing to sing

They say our love won't pay the rent
Before it's earned, our money's all been spent

I guess that's so, we don't have a pot
But at least I'm sure of all the things we got
        -- Sonny and Cher, 1965

Mrs. Davis saved our poetry assignments all year long when I was in 6th grade; in the spring, she published the Room 6 book of poetry.

Though my stuff definitely didn’t stand the test of time, I considered myself to be a pretty good poet back in the day. I had more poems in the collection than most of my classmates and a couple were actually rather clever – if I do say so myself.

It was obvious that our teacher wanted to be sure that every student had at least one poem in the book – and just as obvious that she had a hard time finding a useable sample from one of my classmates, a kid named Frank.

She finally went with the Thanksgiving Prayer assignment. Though poor Frank usually couldn’t find a rhyme for anything, he became a rhymanian devil in this case.

The sample poem/prayer we were provided had a typical pattern to it – sort of one of those aabbccdd kind of deals that produced pretty standard fare along the lines of

Lord, we thank thee for thy bounty
Most of which was grown in our county
Thanks for veggies, fruit and meat
And for all the rest we eat
Thanks for family, friends and pets
We’re grateful all day, until the sun sets

Well, Frank went into some sort of frenzy and became trapped in an intra-line rhyming pattern that may have been an indicator of hidden genius.

I can’t recite the whole thing from memory, but the part that sticks with me goes a bit like this:

Lord we thank thee up above.
For thy good and all thy love.
For the plates and all the states
For those who could and those who would
For those who tried and those who died
For those who lied and those who cried
For the best and all the rest
And for the goats and all their oats.

Like Franks work, many commercial hit songs really don’t bear scrutiny. The lyrics often seem to be a sort of afterthought for songwriters. And I imagine the fact that there is probably little or no editing makes it less likely that the words to songs will really be profound.

If a song sounds good, the words are really a distant second in importance when it comes to popularity. And if the topic is timely and the “message” seems to be right on point – particularly for the target audience – the actual words become quite unimportant.

The Sonny and Cher example (above) seems to support this theory. The lyrics are without merit – but the simple message (if we stick together, we can conquer the world) had enormous appeal to teens back in the mid-sixties.

Another Bono-written hit, “The Beat Goes On” seems to me to be even less profound when read as a poem – sans the music and energy provided by the performers:

Charleston was once the rage, uh huh
History has turned the page, uh huh
The mini skirts the current thing, uh huh
Teenybopper is our newborn king, uh huh

The grocery store's the super mart, uh huh
Little girls still break their hearts, uh huh
And men still keep on marching off to war
Electrically they keep a baseball score

Grandmas sit in chairs and reminisce
Boys keep chasing girls to get a kiss
The cars keep going faster all the time
Bums still cry "hey buddy, have you got a dime"
        -- Sonny and Cher, 1967

There can be absolutely no doubt that the use of logic or even understandable language is not always essential for songs. Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald and others applied nonsense syllables to music – particularly Jazz – and obviously entertained millions of us.

This kind of singing – sometimes referred to as “scat singing” features nonsense words that follow lines of notes that are often improvised – in the fashion of jazz musicians.

Louis Armstrong was an early adopter of nonsense lyrics. He recorded “Heebie Jeebies” in 1926. In this cover by the Boswell Sisters in 1932 the singers are obviously not improvising even when the words lose all meaning in the second half of the song…


Make no mistake about it, I love music. And I've been "taken in" by songs that seem to be filled with meaning but, upon inspection, either deal with platitudes or have practically no meaning at all. Regardless of tendencies toward flight and fancy, I'll continue to appreciate many really dumb songs.

Thank goodness patriotic songs always make sense.

Our nation was founded by folks who put truth to power by declaring, in song: “… he put a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.”