SPUD HILTON READER PICKS FOR FAVORITE ‘PLACE SONGS’
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it turns out that readers of the Travel section get around. If only through music.
After publishing a column in this section recently about popular songs that capture the essence of a place (“Songs that hold the key to a place,” Sept. 4, Page F2), readers responded with some strong picks of their own — and even stronger feelings about “Route 66.”
A reminder: We’re talking about songs that are not just associated with a place, but actually tell you something about the place, in the way that “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” for instance, talks about little cable cars, steep hills and morning fog chilling the air. (My picks included “Walking in Memphis” and “I Love L.A.”)
What follows are some of your suggestions:
Maralyn Tabatsky of San Francisco says Billy Joel’s 1976 ode “New York State of Mind” is “a favorite of mine.” She doesn’t elaborate, although the song definitely qualifies — how do you not love a song that names not one, but two of the city’s newspapers? “It comes down to reality/ And it’s fine with me cause I’ve let it slide/ I don’t care if it’s Chinatown or on Riverside/ I don’t have any reasons/ I left them all behind.”
Reader Fritz Burden says for great “place songs,” you have to go south of the border. Way south, to Brazil. “The immense national, regional, local and neighborhood pride evident in this nation has created a remarkable canon of place-specific tunes,” says Burden, who specifically named “Garota de Ipanema” (“The Girl From Ipanema”), “Aquarela do Brasil” and “Meu Lugar,” the last of which “lionizes the black working class Madureira neighborhood of Rio.”
Burden is willing to concede one song from the States: “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans,” sung by Billie Holiday for the 1947 film “New Orleans.” (Warning: In this dreadful film with a terrific cast, the song is sung at least twice by an opera singer.) If nothing else, the song is further proof that you shouldn’t reference lyrics from Google Play Music, which listed “mardy grass memories” (“Mardi Gras memories”) and “moist covered vines” (“moss-covered vines”).
Mill Valley’s Rona Weintraub was passionate about her favorite song about a place, not surprisingly called “Mill Valley.” “The song (was) written in (1969) by Rita Abrams, who was then a teacher in Mill Valley. She had recently moved to Mill Valley and was so taken with the beauty and friendliness of the town that she sat down on a bench in the plaza and wrote the lovely song,” writes Weintraub. “It was recorded by third-grade kids at the school and produced by famous music producer Eric Jacobsen. (It) was played all over the United States and eventually even in other countries.”
At SFChronicle.com, an online reader who goes by “travel2some” commented: “Hard to get more sense of place than the words to ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by John Denver.” That’s one I support, if only for the line “All my memories gather round her/ miner’s lady, stranger to blue water.” Although my preference is for the cover version by Jason and the Scorchers. The words still have the sense of place — it’s just a grittier place.
And finally, according to Mark Neely of Santa Rosa, “Route 66 ” is about a place — contrary to my theory that it’s just a laundry list of place names — and it has a sense of place. “It just so happens that the place is the entire Western U.S. The roll call of city names, from east to west, establishes the breadth of the geography.”
Another song extolling the virtues of a larger place, says Neely, is Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” “Just hearing the ‘hamburger sizzling on an open grill night and day’ sets the mood. (Berry) was a master at stringing together a lovely list of place names.”
Although there’s a king of songs when it comes to lists of places, according to Mike Carnevale of San Carlos. “And one for fun, just because it names about 96 cities, is ‘I’ve Been Everywhere,’ most famously sung by Johnny Cash.” Carnevale is close. The North American version of the song — the original was written in 1959 by Aussie composer Geoff Mack with Australian place names — offers up 91 places (including probably the only song reference to Chatanika, Alaska), and 92 if you count the opening verse about the dustiness of Winnemucca, Nev.
Fortunately, Carnevale also picks one with as much sense of place as “I Left My Heart” — Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” which, he says, “always reminds me of my hometown.”
Yeah, me too.