A friend of mine speaks of his “phonographic” memory. I believe all of us interested in music have this, else ear-worms would not be a thing, right? Over the past ten years I’ve focused more on this phenomena, and I further believe there’s a distinguishing characteristic between songs we can recall and songs which form our sonic foundation. In the latter type, I don’t mean these are fundamentally good, I just mean that they come unbidden on a Tuesday morning when you’re in the shower, or when you’re driving to the grocery store. Or perhaps you hear a snippet of conversation and an overheard phrase comes to you overlaid with music because it’s word-for-word (or nearly so) with a phrase in a song from your youth.

Here’s one which illustrates the vagaries of this kind of aural memory. “It’s Good News Week” pops into my head every few months for the past couple of years. Why? I have no idea. It gets billed as a protest song, and certainly some of its lines will shake you up–perhaps a few will offend. All I remember, however, are two short stanzas which I have always sung together, but which do not appear consecutively in the song:

It's good news week
Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere
Contaminating atmosphere...

...It's good news week
Doctors finding many ways
Of wrapping brains on metal trays
To keep us from the heat.

Plus, I remember the refrain:

Have you heard the news
What did it say?
Who's won that race?
What's the weather like today?

Memory clouds things, too. I’ve remembered this for nearly 60 years as a novelty song, and listening to it today, it didn’t sound the way I remember it. I wonder if that has something to do with the tiny transistor radio I used to listen to it? Looking at the lyrics today, it seems anything but a novelty song. So many songs from the mid-60’s through the mid-80’s just can’t be played these days. Not like “Walter Wart” from 1966 by The Thorndike Pickledish Choir!