Written By Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/10-132026
Elvis (pictured in 1956)
changed everything in the world of pop culture.
Yup, I’m a geezer. Look at the picture that runs with this column: gray hair (what’s left of it), white beard, other signs of geezerhood. Heck, I was born at the end of the Great Depression and that describes how I feel when I count all the years I’ve racked up.
Got that? One of the sure signs of what polite people call “aging” is a person’s difficulty adapting to changing times.
Take “popular” music. Please, take off all of the pop music on the radio and elsewhere in this digital age. Rap? Take it all away. Turn off the radio or maybe go over to country: (“I learn’t my education out behind the barn. I ain’t foolin,’ no sireee, passed each examination out behind the barn, but it almost made a wreck of me, out behind the barn.”)
When I look back on my long life I sometimes reflect on the pop music of my youth in the 1950s. Songs like, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” It told the story of a person passing a pet shop and wondering how much it would cost to buy the cute little puppy on display.
The song goes on to identify the dog as “the one with the waggly tail.” Can you picture it? What a lyric. Maybe you’ve caught on as a garbage truck driver’s protege and that music comes out on the dashboard radio between trash-hauling stops. Makes your day.
Moving on, this might have sounded risqué when you first heard it on 1950s radio, but not to worry. The song was titled “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” and that “naughty lady” was a newborn baby girl “So delightful to hold, the naughty lady of Shady Lane…is only nine days old.” How inspiring for the youth of my generation, except for a few who were HAVING naughty babies and getting kicked out of high school for it.
And how better to describe true love than this: “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.” Pizza was just being introduced here at that time causing some confusion among older radio listeners, but we teens knew there was no better way to express love than to eat cheese and pepperoni with a main squeeze.
Hey, we can’t ignore the polka folk, so many of them, um, overweight, it seemed. The “Too Fat Polka” warned “I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me.” I’m not sure if that number was performed by a popular polka group called “The Six Fat Dutchman,” or maybe it was popular polka performer “Whoopee’ John Wilfhardt (get it?).
Then suddenly, in 1955 a guitar-strumming 21-year-old Southern boy with a strange name showed up from down at the end of Lonely Street by the Heartbreak Hotel.
Elvis changed everything in the world of pop culture. No more doggies in the window. Gotta rock, rock, rock around the clock, as Bill Haley and the Comets put it at the time. Could the Beatles be far behind?
Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.
