Ice cream trucks usually have some nauseating version of a children’s song piping away as they lure the children to their eventual deaths from extreme obesity and diabetes. However, this ice cream truck has a song that is memorable and maddening. It sounds like some Olde Englishe folk tune, and has overtones of a British military march whose name I forget. However, it’s not that. Do any of my musical lj-friends have a clue as to what this is?
the quality is dreadful, but it sounds to me like something from Purcell. It’s not quite the bit from Abdelazar, or the Moor’s Revenge that Benjamin Britten used for Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, but it’s close. I’ve also got resonances from a tune in the McGarrigle Family Album, which I’ll check this evening.
That’s very kind of you. Do keep me posted, and if you find it out, commenting on the website I linked to would probably endear you to thousands of puzzled ice cream truck lovers everywhere!
It sounds vaguely like it could be a (fragment of an) English Country Dance tune, but I can’t identify it. And the quality of that recording doesn’t help (although I’m sure the original was at least as annoying).
Found it.
It’s sometimes called The Waits Carol and sometimes The Waits Song
Under the first name, it’s the second track on The McGarrigle Christmas Hour, the words of which are here.
There is a 30s clip, but not all of the melody, on the Amazon.com website for the McGarrigle album. However, I did get a MIDI version of it, considerably less scratchy than that recording. I notice that the MIDI resolves into a major chord at the end, that would only happen at the end of the last verse (if at all) when sung of course.
The words are rather “all flesh is grass” and gloomy for something so hedonistic as ice-cream consumption, but there you are. I’ll post this to the blog where you found it, too.
I had no idea what it was. I have found, though, that most ice cream trucks (at least in this country) do not play children’s tunes but, in fact, play opera melodies.
Thanks for that. I see that some people, without reading the comments, have continued to insist that it’s Old King Cole.
I am having difficulty downloading the MIDI file…perhaps lots of people have done so and the bandwidth limit is exceeded. Did you by any chance download it to your hard drive? If so, any chance of emailing it to me?
I pay little attention to ice cream trucks or the nauseating music they play (except to swear at them) and I just assumed that they all played children’s tunes. I will listen more carefully when the tyke-magnet next starts wending its way around the housing estate.
jingles atop ice-cream trucks are pure (and very effective) Pavlovian conditioning. Play the tune, child wants ice cream.