Posted on 12/18/2016 7:19:25 PM PST by nickcarraway
All a cute, curly haired 10-year-old girl named Gayla Peevey wanted for Christmas in 1953 was a hippopotamus.
And amazingly enough, after "I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas" became the biggest hit song of that holiday season, she actually got one, a 700-pound baby named Matilda. She promptly donated it to the Oklahoma City Zoo, where it lived to be nearly 50, a ripe old age for hippos.
As for Peevey's song, it may never die.
"That one just really took off, and it's still going strong, stronger than ever. Sixty-three years later! Hard to believe," Peevey, an ebullient woman of 73, says during a recent phone interview from her San Diego-area home.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcsandiego.com ...
I think that atmospheric, echoey doo-wop sound from the late 50’s is awesome beyond words and I didn’t even exist at the time, lol.
A prime example:
“I think that atmospheric, echoey doo-wop sound from the late 50s is awesome beyond words...”
I’m old enough to remember hearing neighborhood boys singing doo-wop in my elementary school hallways as a small kid. All that concrete and steel created some killer reverb.
Wow, nice memory. It was air guitar by the time I came along, lol.
Here’s another from that era, an instrumental:
Bookmark
“Wow, nice memory. It was air guitar by the time I came along, lol.”
I remember those days, too. It was my heyday, in fact. I slung a mean Stratocaster in those days ;-)
I just clicked on your link to hear it. I know the song well. Brings back lots of good memories.
I’d heard the song on odd occasion all my life and loved it all along, never knew the name of it or who performed it until recent years. Classic in every sense of the word.
“Classic in every sense of the word.”
It’s also a fine bit of songwriting. Those guys knew their stuff.
Woke up in the middle of the night, they were brothers, the song just came to one of them and they had to work it out and play it. That’s where “Sleepwalking” came from, a dream I guess. It certainly sounds like something out of a dream.
Back when I was an active musician, songs used to come to me in dreams all the time. I used to keep a guitar and a tape recorder next to my bed for just such occasions.
Some of my best tunes came to me that way.
I’m in a creative field myself, no musician although I’ve always wanted to be, but my talents and abilities lie elswhere. Funny how the human mind works, I’ve experienced it myself, seemingly perfect things arriving in a dream. I’ve speculated that there’s some sort of subroutine, for the lack of a better word, running in the background of our brains, for creative types at least.
I think the deep relaxation of the dream state can sometimes allow a person to work out a complex matter that’s harder to do while the mind is awake and cluttered with thousands of random thoughts and other tasks.
I’ve occasionally gotten other insights or realizations while in that state. It’s an interesting subject, no doubt.
I loathe that wretched little ditty.
Hippos are nasty characters.
They kill people in Africa on a regular basis.
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