{"id":8241,"date":"2011-07-27T10:51:09","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T14:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=8241"},"modified":"2011-07-27T10:51:09","modified_gmt":"2011-07-27T14:51:09","slug":"midweek-music-break-theme-park-earworms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/midweek-music-break-theme-park-earworms\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: Theme-Park Earworms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Missus and I took a much-needed mini-vacation this past weekend, trekking off to central Florida for (among other things) our first visit to the other<\/em>\u00a0theme park<\/a> in that neighborhood. We love amusement parks and fairs (county, state, you name it), but neither of us is a big roller-coaster fan; most of the rides at our destination park were pure roller coasters, or adaptations of the genre. And if you look through the place’s Web site, you will observe that pretty much all the happy, screaming people in the photos are no more than half our age, and the majority much younger.<\/p>\n

Still, we found plenty to do, although we spent only about five or six hours at the park itself (counting a full dinner).<\/p>\n

The single activity I spent most of the four days engaged in — other than driving, haha — was reading. It felt almost irresponsible, reading so much. I finished one book I’d been reading for weeks; started and finished another in the next 24 hours; and put a huge dent in a third. I read for hours<\/em>\u00a0at a clip. (Of course, it helped that I’d sorta-but-not-quiiiiiite-finished this draft of Seems to Fit<\/em>\u00a0a couple days before. The very last chapter still needs work, but even so, my head was largely empty of responsibility to my own story.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, headed into the midweek I got thinking about theme- and amusement-park music<\/em>. Usually — at least to my mind — this music is associated with carousels, merry-go-rounds, whatever-you-call them, and often has that characteristic hurdy-gurdy sound. (The rides’ up-and-down round-and-round rhythms favor short songs played over, and over, and over, and over…) When I was a kid, a carousel appeared on the streets of our own town every now and again in summer, and the single number I remember it playing was (maybe unsurprisingly) “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.”<\/p>\n

Wikipedia says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[It was] written in 1937 by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin. It is best known as the theme tune for the Looney Tunes<\/em> cartoon series produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, used from 1937 to 1969.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s one Looney Tunes<\/em> rendition, not the opening-titles instrumental but as sung by an early version of guess-who in “Daffy Duck and Egghead” (1938):<\/p>\n