Strawberry Letter 23 was one of those tunes that I learned under the tutelage of New Orleans radio. One of the joys of growing up pre-internet, with bad-quality AM radio, was that we could never really figure out the lyrics to songs. So we made them up. We just flat-out made up our own lyrics to songs, with results that were hilarious, nonsensical and sometimes more poetic than the original lyrics. How many times have I seen lyrics in Apple Music that I was, like, “No, those aren’t the lyrics. Mine are much better!”

I think the result was that we made the songs “ours” because the lyrics we made up came from us, from our subconscious, even, and not from someone else. It seemed to make us identify more strongly with the song. I remember when I was a kid, we would say “This is my song!” when a song we liked came on the radio. We would be so excited because we couldn’t listen to it over and over like we can today. I don’t think people have that strong connection to songs anymore. They gulp the tune and roll.

Anyway, I liked Strawberry Letter 23, but I sang all the lyrics wrong. It was cool, though. The song isn’t very literal anyway, so you could sing anything to it and it wouldn’t matter because of that funky baseline. That funky baseline did HAUL the work. Am I right? You could sing a Beatles tune over that baseline and it would still be funky.

I’m sure there are some funky songs with Betty Boop in them. I like this photo a lot. And the song “Get Dat” hits the right notes for her.

I wrote the first of the posts I owed you from two days ago. Hang on for yesterday’s. It’s coming.

Hey, I finished this before midnight! Sleep!