A Palatable Playlist
Food is music to the body, music is food to the heart: Gregory David Roberts
Delectable food and delightful music: two indulgences that bring pleasure into our lives. And sometimes the two come together – in songs that refer to food or are even entirely dedicated to it! If you haven’t heard these mouthwatering numbers before, you might find they’re worth a listen.
Cool, red, juicy watermelons are a treat we relish through the summers. And across the globe they inspired the American singer Tennessee Ernie Ford to croon “I wish that watermelon would be miiiiine…” as he sits perched upon a fence gazing at a watermelon hanging on a vine in a field. The Watermelon Song goes on to talk about cornbread and pork chops and black-eyed peas – all of which are wonderful, but what the singer really craves right now is that “one great big fat watermelon layin’ in the field”.
Harry Belafonte sings about the Coconut Woman, as she tries to sell her wares by calling out the virtues of coconuts and coconut water. Loaded with iron, it makes you “strong like a lion”; besides, it can be used to make “very nice candy”. By the time you get to the end of the song, you will learn that the cure to being down in the dumps is “coconut water with a little rum”!
Coconuts are not the only fruit we see in Belafonte’s wide and varied repertoire. His immensely popular Banana Boat Song is a traditional Jamaican piece, presumably sung by dock workers loading bananas onto a ship through the night, as they wait for their shift to end at daybreak. It is a work song as evidenced by the refrain the workers chant “stack banana till the mornin’ come…Daylight come and me wan’ go home”.
Jambalaya, named after a traditional Creole/Cajun dish consisting of meat, vegetables, and rice, was written by Hank Williams and has since been sung by several others including Carpenters, in a variety of musical genres. The song is about a party the singer is going to with his girlfriend Yvonne where they will play the guitar, drink out of fruit jars, and devour the feast awaiting them – not just jambalaya but also “crawfish pie” and “filé gumbo”. After all, the idea is to “have big fun on the bayou”.
But life is not always a party and appetising melodies are sometimes served with a dash of cynicism. Lemon Tree, sung by various artistes (the version I am familiar with is by Trini Lopez), exhorts the listener to beware of love, for it is as deceptive as the lemon tree: “Lemon tree very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet; but the fruit of the lemon is impossible to eat”.
Where there are songs about food, there must be songs about wine too. In fact, there are plenty! Red Red Wine, originally recorded by Neil Diamond and later made popular in a reggae-style cover version by UB40, comes to mind at once. The lyrics praise wine as the only way to soothe your woes and make you “feel so grand”. But the only purpose of wine is not to comfort a broken heart and dull painful memories. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s Summer Wine tells the tale of how the enchanted wine made of “strawberries cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring” is used by a wily woman to entice and then sedate a traveller she happens to meet as he walks into her town. He wakes up next morning to realise she has vanished with everything he possessed: “silver spurs, a dollar and a dime”, yet all he craves is more of that magical summer wine.
Some compositions do not even need lyrics. As you listen to the cheerful electronic pips of Hot Butter’s Popcorn, it is not hard to imagine corn kernels fluffing up into little white blobs and bouncing energetically around their container. Another instrumental is the rock-n-roll Tequila performed by The Champs. This is a cheerful Latino style tune, interspersed with a single word – a throaty “Tequila”. Certainly evokes images of lively parties with spirited dancing and lots of tequila!
I shall conclude with French singer Joe Dassin’s catchy song Le Petit Pain au Chocolat which narrates a romance that plays out entirely inside a confectionery. It is the story of a young man who goes every day to buy himself a petit pain au chocolat (a chocolate roll) but being severely short-sighted, fails to notice the pretty girl at the counter smiling down at him, much to her mystification and chagrin. When the astute young lady finally realises what the problem is, she buys him a pair of glasses and, as his hazy world comes into focus, he falls in love with her. They get married in the same confectionery, surrounded by the aroma of warm pastry. And a few years down the line, their little children, as myopic as their father, are seen gambolling around the shop, loading their pockets with petits pains au chocolat.
