Chuck Berry's "School Days"

A couple weeks ago, Chuck Berry's "School Days" was in my head when I woke up.  Actually, it was just a single line:  "Drop the coin right into the slot."  And I noticed something about it:  both times it occurs in the song, the melody of the line descends, so it's something of a musical representation of the lyric itself:  the coin dropping into the slot.  I'm pretty sure the phrase is G' D Bb G (omitting repeated notes), so it outlines a G minor chord.

Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart's I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite?

I recently remembered a musical similarity on Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart's I Wonder What She's Doing Tonite? album that I'd alternately been unable to place and forgotten about.  I finally placed the other tune and verified its similarity, but in listening to the album again (after not having heard it for about a year), I found something else to write about too.

"Love Every Day"

The "ev'rywhere" in the line "You can feel it ev'rywhere" in the middle section is pronounced with an extra syllable.  The "-where" is sung to the notes D# and G#, and that interval (a fourth) musically represents that "ev'rywhere."

"Leaving Again"

The melody of the first line in each verse has a very strong similarity to the first phrase of the tune "Woodworth," used for the hymn "Just As I Am, without One Plea."  In various hymnals I have, "Woodworth" is in D major and Eb major, but since "Leaving Again" is in F major, I transposed the notation:

There are a few differences in rhythm, but all of the pitches are the same.  According to my hymnals, "Woodworth" was written by William B. Bradbury, who lived from 1816 to 1868, so - obviously - "Woodworth" is older than "Leaving Again."  It doesn't seem likely that this similarity is just a coincidence, but I'm not sure whether it was intentional or not.  Aside from this first phrase, the tunes don't resemble each other, so it seems that - consciously or not - Boyce and Hart thought of "Woodworth," used this first phrase (with slightly altered rhythms), but then wrote their own melody for the rest of the song.

"Population"

This wasn't new to me, but since I haven't written about this before, I figured I should include it in this post:

Near the end of the song, there are the lines "Well, you may go to college / You may go to school."  These lines also appear in "Baby, Let's Play House."  I have only Elvis Presley's version, but the lines are exactly the same there: "Well, you may go to college / You may go to school."

"Baby, Let's Play House" is the same song from which the Beatles took the lines "I'd rather see you dead, little girl / Than to be with another man" for "Run for Your Life" on Rubber Soul, so Boyce and Hart's referencing "Baby, Let's Play House" might also be something of a Beatles reference.

Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"

Last week, I had a post about Noel Paul Stookey's "Wedding Song (There Is Love)," and in listening to a Peter, Paul, and Mary compilation album in order to transcribe that, I noticed something about their "Where Have All the Flowers Gone."

In every verse except for the last, there's at least one line that's sung by only one voice.  In every verse, the sixth line (usually with the "Gone to graveyards, ev'ry one" structure) is sung by only a single voice, and in a few, the recurring "Where have all the... gone" lines are sung by only a single voice too.  This shifting between three voices and one voice helps to musically represent the absence that the lyrics allude to.

In some - but not all - of the lines with the "Young girls have picked them, every one" structure, the "every" in "every one" is sung with three syllables rather than two.  This pronunciation emphasizes the complete absence.

That sort of syllabic extension is also present in "passing" and "ago" in the recurring lines "Long time passing" and "Long time ago."  Both are sung to three syllables instead of two, which further represents the length of time.

Noel Paul Stookey's "Wedding Song (There Is Love)"

Near the end of last year, I discovered two Biblical references in Noel Paul Stookey's "Wedding Song (There Is Love)."  I'm finally getting around to writing about them.

In the first and last verse, there's the line "For whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name, there is love."  It's not exactly the same, but it bears a strong resemblance to Matthew 18:20, where Jesus says, "'For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.'"

At the beginning of the second verse, there are the lines "Well, a man shall leave his mother, and a woman leave her home / They shall travel on to where the two should be as one."  There's a bit of poetic license taken here, but otherwise, it's Matthew 19:4-5:  "He [Jesus] answered, 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?"  There's a parallel account in Mark 10, but I think it's more likely that Matthew was the source for both references (especially since they're from consecutive chapters), rather than one from Matthew and one from Mark.