Jolly coppers (on parade)

On 1 Nov 1977, I bought my vinyl copy of Randy Newman's (then) latest album, 'Little criminals'. My feeling at the time was that the production of his albums was constantly improving; this one married the orchestral sounds from the previous albums with a more rock based approach. I have a memory from a few months later, sitting in a chair next to the balcony in my room with the sun shining in and "Jolly coppers" on the radio - this time I noticed the synthesizer hiding behind the horns and it bought a smile to my face.

Fast forward about 30 years: I made a recording of me singing "Jolly coppers", as noted here¹. I thought that I was being smart by making a slight change in the lyrics; in the first verse, Randy sings "Why, they're as blue as the ocean". In the final verse, I changed this to "They're as cool as the ocean", which I though was very neat.

Over the past few days, I've had Randy Newman songs playing in my headphones as I walk around the kibbutz; I haven't heard these songs properly for several months so I was paying close attention... and discovered that I had misheard/misremembered that line. In the final verse, Randy is not singing "They're as blue as the ocean" (despite this being the official lyric) but rather "Coming through the heart of the city"!

I suspect that I sang the song from memory without having the lyrics in front of me. This would also explain why in two other songs I suddenly forgot a word or two and had to improvise. Incidentally, another song that I recorded whilst singing the words from memory is Richard Thompson's "Withered and died"; it turns out that I had inadvertently changed several words from the original - although in one case, I improved the grammar. The line "If I was a butterfly, live for a day" should be "If I were a butterfly" - this is the subjunctive, that is normally used to express wishes or hypothetical situations.

A few songs later in my walking playlist popped up "It's money that I love". This includes the phrase "Oh mama!" This morning I heard this and I noticed that I had unconsciously adopted this phrasing in my recording of "Jolly Coppers" for the rap-like middle section ("Oh mama, that' the life for me"). This really surprised me!

Internal links
[1] 14

---

This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
530	07/01/2013	Recurring actors in long running TV shows	TV series
910	07/01/2016	Vinyl log 25 - 3 January	Vinyl log, Jackson Browne
1000	07/01/2017	1000 blog entries	Meta-blogging
1369	07/01/2021	I haven't disappeared	DBA, Health
1456	07/01/2022	Fourth time around	Covid-19
1572	07/01/2023	Passports	Personal
1705	07/01/2024	dbProlog resurrected	Programming, SQL, Meta-blogging, Prolog