Switched on Pop - Call Your Girlfriend

Episode Date: February 12, 2016

Is it a love song or is it a breakup song? Charlie joins the women of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast to break down their namesake song by Robyn. Also, advice on how to build the perfect wedding playlist. And we check back in with Nate to listen to Cab Calloway on a time traveling adventure back to the 1930s. Featuring Robyn - Call Your Girlfriend Whitney Houston - Dance With Somebody (cappella) Eddie Johns - More Spell On You TLC - Waterfall (Bixel Boy's Remix) Village People - YMCA The O’Jays - Love Train David Bowie - Lets Dance Daft Punk - Get Lucky R. Kelly - Ignition (remix) Beyoncé - Love On Top Elvis Presley - Hound Dog Don Redman - Gee Ain’t I good to you Don Redman - Gotcha Cab Calloway - Minnie The Moocher Cab Calloway - Kicking The Gong Around Cab Calloway - Reefer Madness Louis Armstrong - St. James Infirmary Frankie “Half-Pint” Jackson - Willie The Weeper Naughty By Nature - Hip Hop Hooray Check out more Call Your Girlfriend at www.callyourgirlfriend.com Listen to Zach’s DJ sets at soundcloud.com/zachseely  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding, and I've been feeling kind of lonely because my best friend and co-host Nate has been in a hole writing his dissertation, and it's also mid-February, and I've been wanting to do a Valentine's Day show

about love songs, but without my one true love, Valentine's Day just won't be the same. So in my moping around, I've been digging deep into the podcast world, and I found this great show, Call Your Girlfriend. They say it's a show for long-distance besties everywhere. And since Nate and I usually record a show long-distance, I ask them to join me to put together an episode for Valentine's Day.

I'm so excited to have the co-host and producer of Call Your Girlfriend on the show today. Do you mind introducing yourselves for all our listeners? I'm Anne Friedman. I'm one of the co-hosts of Call Your Girlfriend. And I'm Gina Delvac, the producer of Call Your Girlfriend. I'm so happy that you're here to be my long-distance besties in the absence of my usual bestie, Nate. Before we get into breaking down a song together, do you mind just sharing a little bit about call your girlfriend? Yeah, it is essentially a conversation between me and Amina. Well, yeah, and just a quick shout out to Aminatu,

so Anne's co-host of the show who brings so much as well. Yeah, and we have the occasional guest expert, phone to friend, a cameo, but the heart of it is just us talking about what's in the news, what's in pop culture. We sort of try to bring in things that we would talk in our normal friend conversation about. So we talk about, like, our periods and the weather and what snacks we're eating and some mundane stuff as well. But, yeah, that's basically it. I love it. You two keep it super real, and you also then bring in super awesome and sometimes serious but hilarious guests.

Like the real world. I mean, I feel like most actual human conversations are not like, all right, now we're going to have a serious conversation. No one make any jokes. No one referenced pop culture versus like, okay, now we're going to have a really light conversation. No one's actually going to talk about anything of substance. Truly, most of the conversations that are longer than, you know, a five-minute check-in that I have with my friends are kind of long and weird and rambling and multidimensional. Oh, man, I hope this is going to work then because I was hoping to have just the most serious conversation about love songs and Valentine's Day. Ooh, sorry.

Came to the wrong podcast. Oh, sorry. Okay, okay. Well, that is Valentine's Day. I guess we can have a lighthearted, fun, upbeat conversation. It's also real about love songs. But just before we break down a love song together, I'm curious, what are your feelings about this Hallmark holiday?

I mean, like most things in a capitalist patriarchy, it doesn't turn me on too much, but it's like, it's fine. I don't know. I'm like, not a huge hater, but I also don't celebrate it in any kind of active, like, typical way. Sheena. Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm a huge fan, although I do love crafts, lingerie, and dark chocolate, so it does scratch those inches.

Yeah, I think it's pretty common that we have sort of a relationship to Valentine's Day. And I thought that we might have mixed feelings about Valentine's Day. I wanted to take a song and deconstruct it that sort of matched that feeling. And I thought that Call Your Girlfriend's Theme Song is actually the perfect song. So written by Robin, just this awesome dance anthem. And I wanted to sort of pick this apart. and see how maybe it is not a perfect hallmark love song. Are you ready to dive in with me?

Sure. Let's do it. I wanted to ask you first, how did you choose Robin's song to represent your show? I mean, literally just the title was what we wanted to do with the show, so that was convenient. We love Robin as an icon, and the song seemed to, almost this like pure gut level, resonate with us and with women we know. Yeah, what's your take on the song? What does it mean to you?

I think Anne put it well, the sense of like a... lady hydra of dance party infectious energy. You know, there's like the beat, the sound, the, it's just a delight all the way through. But like you said, it has these darker tones and the lyrical content that make it more complex. And so just like we're, we were thinking about a show that's about all the complexities and fun and dark moments and joys of friendship, especially among women. It seemed like a fitting anthem. Can you give me an overview of what just what is the song about? On the surface of it, it's a song that's about a woman who is seeing this guy and presumably guy, at least the way it's positioned,

and is telling him to, hey, go call your girlfriend and break up with her, tell her how we have the best romance. And it's, you know, it's not her fault, but it's essentially like a prescription for a Dear Jane letter from the other woman. So this is exactly why I love this song, because it feels like it takes on a narrator's position that I just, I never hear in other love songs, if this is or is not a love song. What I really want to do is actually, I want to share some ideas that I've broken down about how the melody of this song

actually perfectly reflects the conflict in that relationship. Are you game to do just a little bit of a musical breakdown? Sure, of course. All right, fun. Okay, so I'm sitting at my piano, and Nate, my co-host is the pianist. So I'm not a pianist.

Don't expect anything particularly beautiful. So what I'm going to say is, I think that the melody and the harmony, they just perfectly match the tone of the song unfolding here. And so it starts right from the beginning. Right at the start, we actually lead in with the chorus. Right? Call your girlfriend.

It's time you had the talk. And I think that this sets up this really beautiful deception right at the top. It goes like this, right? Call your girlfriend. That's like a really pretty little chord. Very major. be like call your girlfriend it's time we had the talk like what talk could that be it might be a nice talk it might be like hey are you going to propose yeah if i just heard that the first time i think

oh this is going to be a love song but but okay so then the song i guess shows its true colors in the second variation on the chorus all right it goes give your reasons say it's not her and then when she hits fall fall minor It's a minor chord. It's sad. It's sullen. And so, oh, this is actually a breakup song. I think that if Robin were a less talented songwriter, she would have missed the opportunity to give us that deception,

that switch from major to minor. And she might have just led us with a minor song, telling us that, yeah, this is actually indeed a bit of a gray area, a little bit of a heartbreak song. You know, she could have instead written the song all in minor chords. Like, call your girlfriend, it's time you have. the talk and give your reasons and say it's not her fault.

But Robin's more subtle than that. She wants to keep this song in a musical gray area because in the next part of the chorus, there is a revived sense of hope. So where the first melody was all descending, cluing in that something in the relationship might not be going right, the second half of the chorus has this more interrogative melody leaving open some sort of question, like maybe there's some opportunity up in the higher range.

But you just met somebody new. See, Robin is leading us on. She's saying, there's more to come. Okay, so chorus opens up, deception, relationship falling apart, and then there's sort of, but maybe there's something possible here. Yeah, right, there's that point and counterpoint.

And then the verse happens. And in the verse, it moves from this sort of interrogative to a total declarative. Here's what's happening. You're breaking up with your girlfriend. It sort of takes the position of the new girl. And she says,

tell her not to get upset, second guessing everything you said and done. Right? Just like, boom, boom, boom. It's like really straightforward. It's all on one note. She's basically saying, here's what's up. One thing that I do think is interesting after the declarative,

tell her not to get upset, second guessing everything you've said and done. later she says don't you tell her there are boundaries in how to be a good breaker-upper in the song don't you tell her how i give you something that you never even knew you missed don't you even try to explain how it's so different when we kiss which is which if you see her as the manipulating other woman character this sort of jezebel feels like a knife twist this feels like the letter that the partner was meant to see whereas if you see her as a compassionate friend or the person who is maybe being broken up with, it's either delineating a boundary that was transgressed or else to say, like, hey, don't do that. They don't need to know about that. I think it's beautiful. She seems to be kind of empathetic, don't you think? I like to believe that Robin is empathetic toward all aspects of the dating flight. All humanity, all womanity, all robots and magic creatures and unicorns. She's really got,

it feels like she has insight into all beings real and ethical. Yeah. She just seems to be. really good at picking up sort of gray area narratives and really get into the reality of what love is about. It's not always sunshine. Yeah, weirdly, right? It's like it's very

much thinking about how is this other woman going to be feeling, what does she need to hear? Unclear in this version, whether that's from the position of a manipulating person who's trying to climb into the girlfriend chair or out of some genuine concern that like, hey, this is

true love, too bad, but like that that really sucks for that. Like, hey dude, deal with your problems. Like, this is actually your problem to deal with. Oh my God. I love Anne that you read it as they get your shit together. I kind of do. Yeah. And she's like, I'm thinking about this. I'm thinking about your girlfriend. Like in this, in this reading of it where she is, in fact, the other woman. Yeah. It's just like, just call her. Just get it over with. Do it. Yeah. Yeah. If she gets upset, tell her that you never meant to hurt anybody and that, you know, she'll get better. It's okay. Like, be kind to her in the process. And so then the music follows this, This idea of be kind to your current girlfriend and help her get through the problem.

Right. So the melody we talked about sort of starts with this descending part. Call your girlfriend. And then it has the sort of interrogative, but you just met somebody new. And then we had this declarative, tell her not to get upset. Yeah. We're going to move into this period of transition and healing. And the way that she does this is she goes, she changes the melody.

It goes into this really high part, right? She says, so you call that a sequence, right, where she repeats the melody two times in a row. But to emphasize the transition, the mending of the heartbreak that the girlfriend should go through, she does this really clever thing where she changes the underlying harmony to the melody. the first time through, she goes So in the first time she plays it through, there's kind of this melodic tension to the underlying chords.

And the second time she plays it, she resolves it. So we've actually heard the same melody twice, but it's gone through this harmonic transformation, just like she's saying, I hope that you can tell your girlfriend and then she says, let her down easy. Right? And when she says, let her down easy,

she goes, let her down easy. Let her down easy. Let her down easy. So we basically have taken the whole narrative arc of the song and matched it to the melody and harmony. So that's my musical breakdown. What do you think? Oh my gosh. Hearing you break that down in terms of that harmonic change is, I mean, for me, I have always believed that this song is not actually from the perspective of the other woman.

Yes. I don't know if it was on my first listen, but like somewhere early on realizing that when she's really crescendoing, when she's hitting those high notes, it's like, oh, yeah, the way she sings this, it's not so much. the lyrics, but like the way she sings, it leads me to believe that she is the one in the relationship getting told. Oh, okay. Or called, or called, as it were. Robin is the girlfriend. Don't you see? Yeah, and I think that, like, you know, it's, um, there are something about, like, especially those lines, you'll learn to love again, you know, your heart will men, blah, blah, blah, you know, in some ways I read it as like hopeful. Like, I'm, like, looking back and talking to my previous self who was in this position. But,

But it's also a little bit sarcastic. Like, that's the kind of, you know, pretty patented breakup speak that you say to anyone. Yeah, breakup problem, right? Exactly. And it's like, you know, and I'm also, it's also very informed by watching her dancing to this song. It's like she's like the preeminent power dancer. Yeah, the video gives us a lot of clues because it is her dancing alone in a warehouse and not looking that joyous. She's not the one celebrating like, I'm going to get the guy.

It's the like, oh, I'm getting the advice. Yeah, it's like, it's slightly painful. painful and angry, but also, like, life-affirming. And she's wearing, she's wearing leggings. She's in, like, a fuzzy sweater. She's wearing, like, lady comfort wear. That's true. And there's a lot of power in the video, too.

Totally. There's, like, a total reclamation of, like, her own position in whatever this love triangle is, she exists very comfortably on her own. Between the body language and her delivery, like, I think separate from even lyrics and melody, it makes me feel pretty confident that she is not the other woman, the narrator. Oh, she's not the narrative. She's the one being broken up with. Exactly.

Also, what kind of condescending jerk tells the person who they've, who's, you know, like, just been dumped because they've been cheating on your partner to like, oh, don't worry, you'll learn to love again. I mean, what a jerk. Like, I don't want to believe that's Robin. Kind of patronizing. Exactly. Is this person being somewhat of a gentleman to at least call his girlfriend instead of texting to break up? Well, he hasn't called anyone. Right.

We don't know what he did. This is just like women offering opinions on bad dude behaviors. Right. Which is also what our podcast is about. Take note. All right. I learn a lot about how I ought to be a better man in the world by listening to your show. And I hope that lots of Switch on Pop listeners would love to hear it too.

Where can they go to hear more episodes of Call Your Girlfriend? Call Your Girlfriend.com. We always link to the latest there. Or you can find us on iTunes pretty easily. Or on the ACAST app. It's been so much fun talking with you too. And Call Your Girlfriend is just such a great podcast. Thank you so much.

This has been so much fun. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Charlie. Definitely check out more episodes of Call Your Girlfriend on their website, call your girlfriend.com. And they're also producing a live show in Los Angeles with Rebecca Tracer, author of All the Single Ladies on March 7th. You can find out more info on their website.

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Okay, so with Robin's track, we definitely covered a lot of the gray area of love, and I want to move past that. I thought it would be fun to look at the flip side. It's February, and I'm getting lots of save the dates for summer weddings. And it got me thinking about how do people go about choosing the songs for their big day? So I asked one of my favorite DJs about how he goes. is about skippering the DJ Love Boat. This is Zach Sealy. I'm a DJ out of New York City.

I've had the honor of going to a number of your parties, and you are an astounding DJ. You are so meticulous about how you go about choosing your playlists. So as Valentine's Day is here, and couples may be thinking about their future weddings and thinking about how do they get their friends grooving on the dance floor, I was hoping, Zach, you could give us a little insight on how you go about your process. Yeah, I do get asked quite a bit these days, and I've had to think a lot about how to put these things together to keep them novel and fresh. I think one of the most important things is to remember this is about nostalgia.

People are here not to be challenged. People are not here to be challenged on the dance for with some like techno song no one's ever heard. They want to hear something that they know. So it's my job to try to bring something novel to the table. Like what's that one song that maybe like everyone will know but they've never danced to? They know every lyric and they're going to leave that party being like that time when he played

that song. And I never thought of that. That's what you want to do. You seem to have your own method into building your playlist. On one hand, things are super organized. You have things perfectly organized by key, BPM. You know exactly how you're going to flow through things. But I really want to know, how do you even go about choosing those songs?

Yeah, the issue with DJ in a wedding is that you're going to have to populate it with, like, only songs that people recognize. When I throw my own parties that are not wedding-based, I use pop songs very sparingly. They're supposed to be there for like surprise or novelty. Like you've earned it at some point. So after 30 minutes of dancing to like songs you may not know, you get to hear a song that you recognize and there's a big payoff. With a wedding, you can't really do that.

But I approach it with the same philosophy. So that means you need to be able to like surprise people at some point, reach down into the archaeology of pop music, pull out something that's very nostalgic that maybe they've never danced to, but they all know. And that's really the goal to make it really novel. otherwise just hearing Michael Jackson, every song is going to be boring. So you talk about needing to have this balance of things which are familiar but also novel.

How do you find that balance? I think there's a lot of tricks in the DJ like repertoire that you can really use. Like one thing to make a song maybe like sound more novel is to actually open it up with the alcapella, for example. Another way to do it is like if, for example, a daft punk song, they like sample a disco track like over and over again so you can tease out that sample from the original disco track for like minutes on end and like really build anticipation for people and that's a way to make that song feel novel again and also just like frankly the internet's like this treasure trove

of like updated edits of like TLC tracks they really help you like put together a great list so do you do you take the same approach for weddings? Absolutely. Every song needs to be recognizable. So it's like maybe every five or, you know, maybe every eight songs you want to pull in something that is going to be that surprise. It is going to be that like, oh, like, what is this? Yeah. One thing I saw oftentimes when you're playing something is like, I know this song, but I've never heard it like this before. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I've seen you work your computer at a number of weddings and you're like a mad scientist, just constantly mixing things on the fly. You told me you kind of have like a secret formula for how you think about choosing your playlist. So maybe you could help some of our listeners who are thinking about building their playlist.

How can they make sure they don't build something stale, something that which is too familiar, but keeps things fresh? Yeah. So, I mean, I think I think of three things that you can really base like your whole entire set around. And you need to try to include one, a song that's like performative, one or two songs that are performative. And there's always the dangerous one which you would never, ever want to play, which is YMCA, obviously. Don't go there. Don't obviously go there. But, you know, I think a good example is a song like Love Train.

Everyone knows how to do that. Everyone knows what they're supposed to do. There's a performative nature to dance music that you see in techno and house music. It's trying to get you to dance. And if you have, like, a prescribed train you need to make to a song that's, like, that's what you need to go about doing. There's certain ritual to that. Or even, like, the imperative of,

David Bowies, let's dance. It's telling the crowd, let's dance. That's always a good way to go. It gives you permission to dance. So you get permission through the performance. Okay, first thing. What's second? Number two is you need to have good, relevant, recognizable lyrics.

And this is something I finally gave up as a DJ, like trying to be challenging to people. I'm basically a gigantic karaoke machine. People want to know the lyrics. And the lyrics need to be relevant for that night. There's a really classic example. like It Takes 2 by Rob Bass Or recently the big wedding song from a few years ago was Get Lucky, obviously talking about

like all the single people out there like on the dance floor, what they may want to do. Simple lyrics to follow. You know, but another thing is, you know, like I always like to play R. Kelly's remix to Ignition, you know. And after the show is to have the party. Where's the after party guys in the hotel lobby, right? So, like, there's something people like to sing about that,

and they like to sing, like, about what is happening at the wedding. So, like, Justin Timberlake's suit and tie, you know, like, represents, the lyrics represent, like, what people are wearing and what they're doing. And they seem to be into that. People do. So what's the third secret you've got? All right. So number three, and this one maybe is very obvious, but I think it's really, really important,

is that this needs to be relevant to multiple generations. So, like, sometimes I'm going to hear, like, a great pop song that'll just have come out, and I'm really excited to play it. But the thing is, is that pop music sort of has, like, a longer gestation period or a longer time period to reach, like, everyone that's going to be at that wedding. So the uncle and the aunt. So you really need to be looking at, like, top 40 songs. If you are going to play top 40, that are more in, like, the two to six month range, not the one that's just released. But also mix it up with something, like, that's, you know, like, tasteful pop. So I always like to play like a Beyonce song, you know, and I want to be careful and do like the right ones.

Like love on top is a more tasteful version than maybe something else by her. And then also I think bringing in the 50s and 60s, Elvis Press' hound dog. Chuck Berry. Those are always great ways that you can just put in maybe two or three throughout your set that keeps things relevant for everyone there. Do you take requests? I'll give you two answers. If it's my own party, I'd tell them that there's a wedding across the street. And if it is, this is my secret, but if someone at a wedding asked me for requests, and I don't feel like it's right, I just say the couple said that they didn't want me to play that song.

Oh. So that's a bit of a lie. But, you know, I have to be careful. I'm trying to like, I feel like I know what's going to be best for the party, and it's not always great to take requests. I've seen people dancing on your dance floor ages 2 to 92. and you keep it going. Yes, thank you. Thank you.

Yeah, no, that ends up being very important. You don't need to appease everyone at the party, but just every once in a while I'll bring it in, and that's going to help keep everyone on the dance floor. All right, if I get this right, so we need something that's performative, we need lyrics that we know are about love, our soundtrack to our wedding,

and we need to have songs which are relevant to multiple generations. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that'll help you put together a good playlist, putting those three things together, putting in some other things, basing your set around those things will help out. If you want to hear a couple samples of Zach's DJ sets, you can check them out on SoundCloud at Zach Seeley.

That's Zach with a C-H and Seeley with two E's. And also, we're going to compile a playlist of wedding hits because, hey, why not? We'll put it on Spotify. Please tweet us your suggestions at Switched on Pop. Last week I checked in with Nate, who was writing his dissertation about the intersection of race and music in 1930s Harlem Jazz Clubs.

We had a pretty amazing adventure exploring the music of the era, so I thought I'd check in again and see how he's doing. And Nate, can you hear me? Heidi ho, Charlie. Hidy-ho, how you doing? I'm very well, thanks. Good thing. So last time on the show, as a little break from writing, you decided that you'd share some of your work with us. And we time traveled together back to the 1930s in Harlem, going out to see some really hot jazz.

And I was hoping that on this Monday night, maybe you could take a little break from your writing and take us out on the town again. Yes, Charlie, I'm always looking for a chance to procrastinate and going out to Harlem on a Monday night is perfect because we're going to the Cotton Club. And Monday night is actually the night that they broadcast their show live out over the CBS airwaves out to the whole country. So it's going to be a good one, I think. Oh, I hope I'm on the radio. Maybe if I cheer loud enough. So let's head up town to 145th Street and Lennox Avenue. Let's walk into the Cotton Club, and let's be greeted by one of the biggest names in jazz in the 1930s, Cab Callaway.

It's hot. Cab Calloway is this incendiary performer, wearing a white suit, holding a baton, contorting his body all over the stage, and with this huge four-active vocal range, singing ballads and hot jazz, leading an orchestra of killer solo. I mean, this is the best show in town. Oh, right. You always take me to the best spots. Yeah, and I bet as we walk in, Calloway's going to be playing his signature song, Minnie the Moutcher.

Folks, here's a story about Minnie the Mouture. She was a red-hot, huge, goocher. She was the roughest, toughest, trail. But Minnie had a heart, as big as So can you guess why Calloway was known as the Heidi Ho Man? Well, I have no idea what it means, but I definitely heard him say it a number of times in that song. Yeah. Beautiful song.

Yeah. And we'll come back to that. But I want to argue that Calloway was a really important figure at this time because he acted as kind of an ambassador from local Harlem subculture to white mainstream America. Right. He's being broadcast all across the airways. Yeah. Exactly. And through archival research I've done, I've found that his management team actually promoted him this way and would include things like lexicons for deciphering the kind of Harlem slang that Calloway used in his songs so that people listening out in, you know, Topeka or wherever could still be an insider, could kind of understand the jive that people were speaking in Harlem at that time. It's like a pre-internet urban dictionary.

Yeah, yeah, it's like babblefish for 1930s jazz. So when we listen to a song like Minnie the Moutcher, I think you can hear Calloway really deliberately using the kind of language that was associated with Harlem at this time. Language you had to work to understand, like in the first lyrics of this song. Folks, here's a story about Minnie the Moutcher. She was a red-hot huge. So we've got some words that are probably unfamiliar to us in there.

Like, what is a moocher and what is a hoochie coacher and what is a frail? So he's using this sort of coded language as a way of claiming his authenticity to his locale. Exactly. And if you can decode that language, you kind of get access to this rich Harlem life. But he knows that he's being broadcast everywhere. This is amazing. It actually kind of makes me think of, in modern music now, there's this desire to not just make a song with a great hook that is super catchy and memorable, but to actually turn your song into a meme. I think Drake is probably most famous for this, where he's dropping memes all over the place

that are going all over the internet before even sometimes the single drops. Yeah, and this is such a great analog because if you look at these archival marketing materials, his managers were definitely trying to memeify Cab Callaway. Like they have these promotional materials that they would, give out to radio stations, where they would say, hey, when Cab Calloway comes to your town to perform, here's an idea. Why don't you have the local diner serve Minnie the Moutcher hot dogs? It's commercial integration in music right from the start. They understood the value of these Harlem characters that Calloway was singing about.

And in some ways, Calloway is capitalizing on this stereotypical vision of Harlem as this illicit neighborhood of drugs. sex and music, especially because so many of his songs are exactly about that. Like Minnie the Moutcher, remember if she's a frail? Well, that is actually code for a sex worker. Oh. And then he's got other songs like Kicking the Gong Around, which is slang for using heroin. Kicking the Gong around. Or Riefer Man.

Or have you ever met that funny Riefer Man? Which is probably self-explanatory. But at the same time, that Calloway was promoting this version of Harlem. I think he was also projecting a more authentic and a more lived experience of Harlem because Minnie the Moutre, this song we were just listening to, is actually kind of an amalgamation of two songs

that were really popular in Harlem in the late 1920s. Oh, what are those? One was St. James Infirmary, which had recently been recorded by Lewis Armstrong. Great tune. I went down to St. James Infirmary. So even though they're in different keys, I think you can hear the similarities between Armstrong's melody to St. James Infirmary and Calloway's melody to Minnie the Mouture. Folks, here's a story about Minnie the Mouture.

I went down to St. James Infirmary. Here's a little story about Minnie the Mouture. I went down to St. James Infirmary. Okay, so he's definitely playing off the Armstrong track. Yeah, you can kind of make a mashup of those two. And then lyrically, I think he's drawing on another song that was popular by a guy named Frankie Half Pint Jackson, one of the great names in early jazz. Must have been a lightweight if he was a half pint only. Yeah, well, I think he was like four foot three, too.

Oh, wow. And this song was called Willie the Weeper. Yeah, so what's going on in this one? In this formulation, you can hear Calloway kind of stealing it for his own song. Folks, here's a story about Willie the Weeper. Folks, here's a story about Minnie the Mouture. So it's kind of the same construction lyrically. So by combining St. James Infirmary and Willie the Weeper,

Calloway gets this new song that kind of represents both the music and the lyrics of Harlem that were popular at that time. Okay, so what does this mean in the world of Harlem Jazz and now the canon? of this era. You know, there's another move that Calloway does in this song that was really kind of a game change for the sound of American popular music. What's that? It's that Heidi, Heidi Ho. How come?

Because when Calloway sings Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, hi, and then the audience responds, Charlie, Heidi, Heidi, ho. We're engaging in this West African musical tradition of call and response. that's become one of the most recognizable contributions of African and African American music to the sound of pop music. When I say, hey, you say, ho, it keeps going. So in our last segment, we talked a lot about the challenges that Harlem musicians faced at this time, a time before the civil rights era, a time when these visions of racial difference that were really reductive and violent were so commonplace. but in the music of Cab Calway,

he also finds a way maybe to transcend that and to get everyone in America singing Heidi Ho and teaching them how to do this call-and-response technique. It is kind of a bridge between this neighborhood in New York City and the rest of the country. It's amazing how he's using his locale to then train everybody else, how jazz works, and basically make it the mainstream popular music.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, we have Harlem to thank for that in a lot of ways. I dig it. All right, so it's feeling kind of late. Maybe we should get in early for Monday night. We can go out another night. Ooh, all right. Well, only so we can save ourselves for the next expedition, Charlie. Ooh, I'm excited. You're going to tell us, or is it a secret? I think next time we'll look into Calloway's main competitor for the role of greatest Jasmine in the land, Duke Ellington. Ah, the Duke. Great. Can't wait for it. This episode of Switched-on-Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding, and by my pal, Nate Sloan.

A big thanks to Anne and Gina from Call Your Girlfriend and to our wedding DJ and residence, Zach Seeley. Again, if you have any love songs that you'd like to add to our playlist, please tweet us at Switched-on-pop. You can check out more episodes of the show at Switchedonpop.com, and we'll be back in two weeks with another episode about one of our favorite faceless singers. A mystery. And until then, thanks for listening. Convierter your passion in a with Shopify and bathe records of with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world.

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