Attack of the earworms

The many moods of Jeannie C.

I’ve mentioned before how sometimes random songs come out of nowhere and get stuck in my head. There the song will stay for days or weeks, its various verses on infinite loop until another useless memory arrives, just as mysteriously, to replace it.

It seems to happen a lot these days. I blame it on getting older. Maybe at a certain stage in life the brain decides it’s time to start clearing out the attic. So it rummages through the sagging boxes of memory, once in a while holding up random items for inspection: You want this? You sure? Maybe you should listen to it a few million times before you decide.

This time the song is “Harper Valley PTA.” It’s been lodged in my head since before Father’s Day. Don’t ask me why. It was a dumb song in 1968 and it’s a really dumb song now. If there’s ever a ’60s tune I would gladly purge permanently from all recollection, this is it. Well, that and “MacArthur Park” (also from 1968).

And yet my brain is humming as I write this: “I wanna tell you all the story ’bout a Harper Valley widowed wife…” Tom T. Hall wrote the song, but Jeannie C. Riley made a career out of it. You might say she milked it for all it was worth. As you can see by the album cover, pretty much every track on the title album references some character or milieu mentioned in the title track. Good for her. But it needs to stop.

That’s where this post comes in. My theory is that perhaps the song will now become lodged in your cortex and thus depart from mine. You know, like the demon in one of those straight-to-streaming horror movies. Enjoy!