Why we remember music and forget everything else

Ain’t that the truth!

I used to watch a lot of Westerns on TV in the late 50s and early 60s. Even though I have not heard most of the theme songs since then, I can still sing a couple dozen in their entirety, even when I can’t really recall the show. I’m not just talking about The Rebel and Have Gun Will Travel, because those songs became charted hits and still pop up now and then. I mean the really obscure ones that I’ve never heard again in the past 60 years. For example, I can sing the themes to Johnny Ringo, Bronco (Layne) and The Adventures of Jim Bowie, although I can’t picture anything about the shows. And the songs bring back vivid memories of the old shows I really liked, like Sugarfoot, Yancy Derringer and Cheyenne. If the lyrics to the theme songs from Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were poems or snippets of prose, I’d never remember them, yet I seem to remember every verse verbatim.

My favorite was one with quite a touch of bittersweet poetry:

Cheyenne, Cheyenne, where will you be campin’ tonight?
Lonely man, Cheyenne, will your heart stay free and light?
Dream, Cheyenne, of a girl you may never love
Move along, Cheyenne, like the restless cloud up above.

The wind that blows, that comes and goes, has been your only home.
But will the wild wind one day cease and you’ll no longer roam?

Move along, Cheyenne; next pasture’s always so green.
Driftin’ on, Cheyenne, don’t forget the things you have seen,
And when you settle down, where will it be? Cheyenne

In a similar, less personal vein, if you have ever run into an occasion where the theme songs to The Brady Bunch or Gilligan’s Island have come up, you realize that almost every baby boomer can sing these songs word for word, note for note. That was an old-time thing wasn’t it? So many shows used to have theme songs that explained the entire premise of the show.

People even recall the tune and words for songs they used to hate, like Copacabana. It is an amazing phenomenon, and not always a pleasant one, as you know if Seasons in the Sun has ever become an earworm.

24 thoughts on “Why we remember music and forget everything else

    1. Let’s face it, he was a bold, adventurin’ man – a fighter, a fearless and mighty adventurin’ man.

        1. Well, to be specific, Bret was a legend of the west. Bart, on the other hand, was a humorless douchebag.

          And don’t get me started on Beau and Brent.

          1. And poor brother Brent! Alas, we hardly knew ye! At least Cousin Beau got a little Moore love.

  1. Being born in 1968, I basically watched syndicated TV all through the 1970’s. If there was one show I watched more than any other it was the Brady Bunch. My younger brothers and I watched those episodes so many times, we could identify the episode from watching just the first 5 seconds. I no longer have that ability.

    As far as westerns, the one I really liked was the Rifleman. I would also watch Bonanza. Speaking of music, Bonanza has one of the 3 best (instrumental) TV themes of all time. I’d also put Hawaii Five-O among the 3. I was a huge fan of Daniel Boone as a kid. I used to get up at 5:30 am, because Channel 9 would air it from 5:30 to 6:30 in weekdays and I’d watch it before getting ready for school. It had a really cool theme song as well.

    Daniel Boone was a man
    Yes a Big Man
    With an eye like an eagle
    and as tall as a mountain was he

    Daniel Boon was a man
    Yes a Big Man
    He was brave, he was fearless
    and as tough as a mighty oak tree

    1. I always start to drum the beat with my fingers on my desk when the theme from Hawaii 5-0 starts! Catchy!

    2. So what is the best instrumental TV theme of all time? I cast my vote for Peter Gunn, by a whisker over Mission: Impossible.

      1. I like 5-0 the best. Runners up, in addition to those already mentioned, should include Miami Vice, The Rifleman, and Hill Street Blues.

        American Experience (PBS) has possibly the most beautiful melody.

      2. and sometimes, for no good reason, if someone goes away then comes back, I mentally hear the Welcome Back Kotter theme and feel like asking them if their dreams were their ticket out.

      3. Mission: Impossible is my favorite, closely followed by BookEmDano.

        But I have to give a shout-out to these since I haven’t seen them mentioned yet:

        Mannix (great piano riff, Lalo Schifrin again)
        Ironside
        The Streets of San Francisco

  2. I see your “Seasons in the Sun” and raise you “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I’ve Got Love in my Tummy”, which I was surprised to learn was not about Linda Lovelace.

    1. Gosh, I hope Ohio Express is in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. If ever there was a deserving group. (Did the group even exist or was it just a generic name given to Buddah’s unused studio material?)

      1. Let’s not forget their follow-up hit, “Chewy Chewy,” so yeah, a band with amazing lyrical versatility. The lead vocalist, Joey Levine, also sang lead on that ultimate masterpiece of bubblegum pop, “Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me.” Screw you, “American Pie”–THIS is the history of rock music, and he only needed three and half minutes.

      2. Check out the latest episode of Todd In The Shadows’ YouTube series “One Hit Wonderland.” It’s ostensibly about “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” by Edison Lighthouse, but it develops into a look at the lead singer of that fictitious group, who was also the singer on half the bubblegum hits of that year, all released under the names of various nonexistent studio bands.

        1. Tony Burrows claims that he sang the lead on 100 songs that made the top 20 in the 1970s. He was the lead singer in four different “groups” that had top 20 hits in 1970 alone!

          Nearly everyone in the western world has heard him sing, and if his claim is true, he may have more charted hits than Elvis or the Beatles.

          But nobody knows him.

          1. I do now – for singing on about a half dozen of my unfavorite songs!
            My favorite tv themes involve Mrs. Peel shooting the cork out of a champagne bottle (the Avengers) or a snake crawling across a floor (I Claudius). Big on visuals.

  3. Thanks. So true. When I find I can remember Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies & The Patty Duke Show theme songs, it’s fun. At the same time, I feel both stupid & ashamed. I mean, since when is “identical cousins” a thing?

    Looking back, I can see how bad the writing was. How could I have wasted so much time watching TV when that’s what was on? OTOH, I was a kid. The material was even aimed at the adults who were watching over the kids, sometimes, & went over the kids’ heads. I was reading before kindergarten, so I got some of the adult jokes.

    Like when Fred & Barney were trying to name a boat they’d acquired somehow, Fred wanted to call it Nautilus, Barney liked Queen of the Sea, and they compromised on Nau-Sea. But Wilma didn’t like that name & remarked that it spelled “nausea”.

    While searching for the above songs, Lyrics On Demand was at the top. Not that I haven’t seen that site before, but there are many competing sites that used to come up first. So, the new top site is good for this as it has a TV Themes category. Among other nice features, I assume.

    Thing is, we still don’t know why, anyway. Science can never really answer a why question. It can only elaborate on how. But one why answer always leads to more why questions, ad infinitum. We may recognize what an explanation tells us, relate it to our experience.

    But the content, really, is like when a comedian says, “You know, like, when you toss a bunch of thumb tacks on a hard floor & then roll around in the nude & it hurts & like, your blood gets all over the place? You know? I mean, like, don’t you just hate it when that happens?” Sure, sure. I’ve done it a million times, myself. I always wish it didn’t happen, but only afterwards. It’s so familiar, though. Hey, whatcha gonna do?

  4. I have no problem with my brain prioritizing music. I’d rather spend the whole day humming “It’s Good News Week” by Hedgehoppers Anonymous (which is a thing that happened) than just white noise. The trick is to fill your head with as many songs as you can, so you can plug another one in when you get tired of the last one. Which is why you need to keep looking for new (or at least new to you) songs to add to your playlist. Seriously–if I woke up one morning to suddenly find myself completely tone deaf, I think I’d wanna die.

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