John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt

While I could go back to the things I heard on my parents’ radio, they tended to listen to CFRB 1010, which was mostly chatter and not music. However, I don’t remember a lot of it mostly because if the radio wasn’t on, there wasn’t a lot of music in the home I grew up in, not until I got older, anyway.

When I was a child, my sister and I shared (inasmuch as children share anything) a Mickey Mouse-branded record player (yes, I’m old enough to have owned 45s). We had a small pile of child-friendly records obtained from various resources, including one record (the name of which I’ve long forgotten, nor can I find any image in Google that reminds me) released by Disney that contained this song.

Now as much as I would like to actually identify any other song on this record — for my first song in this list, it is ironic that this is one I don’t like — I can’t recall any. It’s likely because I didn’t like this song that I remember it far too clearly for my own good. (To be fair, we had other Disney records, such as the one that offered the soundtrack of Disneyland, including the themes from *Pirates of the Caribbean *(the ride, not the movie), Haunted Mansion, Country Bears Jamboree, and the music from the various parades. But that was my parents’ record, and it remained in their collection (which I would, years later, raid and discovery they had far cooler music that they actively disowned for whatever reason).

We had other 45s as well, such as the first Smurfs record, which included a song called “Little Blue Boat”, which I also disliked, but listened to because … well, when you’re a kid and all you have is a few records and no (direct) access to a radio, you get what you get.

And so these songs, played endlessly, remain in my head, despite all efforts and music genres to try and scrub them out.