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Telephone songs

The New Neo Posted on by

I hear that telephones are growing obsolete, at least in terms of using them for actual conversations. They’re really just voicemail services and computers, especially for people under the age of 50.

But the telephone used to be a big theme in popular music – and in life.

This one fairly sizzled:

This next song is one of my absolute favorite telephone songs. Scratch that – it’s actually my favorite:

From my youth:

This next one I never liked. Not my cup of tea. But it was big at the time, and it’s certainly about telephones. I have to say, though, that I did do my share of waiting anxiously by the phone for a boyfriend to call. This song was only possible before the advent of caller ID, because it relies on the singer not knowing who’s calling when the phone rings until she picks it up. Anticipation; it’s keeping me waiting:

And then there were the days of exchanges like “Beechwood”:

In 1978 we had this:

There are plenty more.

Comments

Telephone songs — 41 Comments

  1. The ELO song is great and to get the ringing sound they made a call to the US and recorded it ringing because they didn’t like how the ringing sounded on calls in England.

  4. Croce’s biggest early singles were ballads about barfights. But with “Operator” and “Time in a Bottle” he proved himself to be anything but a one-trick pony. When I was commuting by car on a regular basis, I loved plugging in a Croce tape/CD and singing along to many of his songs. He was taken from us far too soon.

  5. One telephone song that I remember is a humorous one– Allan Sherman’s “Let’s All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President March”:

    It’s the “The Let’s All Call Up AT&T and Protest To The President March.”
    Can you see him smirking and smiling?
    ‘Cause he’s got us all digit dialing.
    So let’s all call up AT&T and protest to the president march!
    So protest! Do your best!
    Let us show him that we march in unity.
    If he won’t change the rules,
    Let’s take our business to another phone company.

    Let’s all call up AT&T and protest to the president march.
    Let us wake him up in his slumber.
    Get a pencil, I’ll give you his number.
    It’s 3 1 8 5 2 7 3
    0 8 7 4 2 9 dash!
    5 1 1 4 9 0 6 7
    4 0 8 5 2 hyphen!
    1 1 4 6 2 0 5
    7 9 hyphen dash 0 3.
    And now that you’re on the right road,
    Don’t forget his Area Code.
    Which is 5 1 8 2 4 7 9
    0 5 hyphen dash 9 4.

    Where are the days of Auld Lang Syne?
    Butterfield 8! Madison 9!
    Let’s keep those beautiful names alive.
    Crestview 6! Gramercy 5!
    Get ready to fight before it’s too late!
    Temple 2! Murray Hill 8!
    Let’s let them know that this means war!
    Gettysburg 3! Concord 4! Hurray!

    To all telephone subscribers,
    We’ll erect a triumphal arch,
    For the “Let’s All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President March.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHTazxaQ9bs&ab_channel=TheaHogberg

  6. In 1961, I bought my first radio. It was a portable transistor (no tubes!) radio about the size of a brick. I quickly grew tired of carrying the thing around, but not before acquiring a vivid memory of Paul Anka singing “Kissing on the Phone.”

    I just listened to the song, for the first time in all those years, and it doesn’t age well. Reverse nostalgia? There must be a German word for that kind of thing.

  7. Yeah, there were a lot of telephone songs in the old days. Songs representing telephone conversations, songs referring to telephone calls, songs using telephones as a prop.

    Killing the birds of gender confusion and telephone songs with one cast stone, I’ll link to this rather poor quality one, which I had to go out of my way to discover:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSaM8WbscYk&t=42s

    It is a real girl, singing the song we children only imagined a girl was singing when we heard the Chris Montez version.

    There is a very famous scene in the musical Bye Bye Birdie involving a telephone conversation which is possibly worth linking to … too.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wKoVAQkGLc

    But that is not it, because, in comparison … who cares …

  9. I was beaten to the punch. Sherman’s is obviously the best telephone song.

  12. One of the few rock concerts I attended was an Aerosmith and ZZ-Top concert and the opening act was Tommy Tutone. The TT group had two strikes against them. One, they weren’t really a hard rock band; and two, they were a one-hit-wonder.

    So they played two or three lousy songs leading up to their hit, 867-5309/Jenny. The crowd in Albuquerque got agitated quickly and while I was hoping people would enjoy the band a little while they were ringing for Jenny, instead the crowd hit fever pitch and the security staff had to pull them off the stage for their own safety.

  14. Cornflour said, “Reverse nostalgia? There must be a German word for that kind of thing.”

    Umgekehrtenostalgie

  15. The Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson) died in that plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens, after playing the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.

    Waylon Jennings offered him his seat.

    On a friendly wager, Valens flipped a coin with Allsup for his seat on the plane—and won. Meanwhile, J.P. Richardson was suffering from the flu and was complaining that the bus was too cold and uncomfortable for him, so Jennings voluntarily surrendered his seat. Upon hearing that his bandmates had given away their plane seats, Holly joked, “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up again.” Jennings jokingly replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” Those words haunted Jennings for the rest of his life. …

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bopper

  20. Cloned,

    When Chuck Berry turns around and Yoko is doing her rabid dolphin call is pretty funny.

  22. “I Can’t Get Over a Girl Like You, So You’ll Have to Get Up and Answer the Phone Yourself” but I guess that’s only a joke, not a real song title.

  23. Wilson Pickett tells us his phone number in 634-5789. But going back to Blondie, when I saw them play live the thing I was most struck by, and have never been able to get over ever since, is that Debbie Harry’s head was too big for her body. She was dancing all around, doing a lot of ironic go-go moves, but once I had noticed how big her head was, it couldn’t be unseen.

  24. Telephone Blues
    John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, 1965
    by John Mayall, with Eric Clapton (and John McVie on bass, who left to form Fleetwood Mac with Mick Fleetwood and Peter Green in 1967. Green replaced Clapton on guitar when he left to form Cream. Fleetwood was briefly with the Bluesbreakers, and there is a YouTube recording or two, until Mayall booted him for being drunk at a performance).

    https://youtu.be/YutZ3Y5Vf8Y

    * a side note, when Clapton didn’t show once, a 16 year old from the audience volunteered, Mick Taylor. Taylor replaced Green when he left, and then replaced Brian Jones with The Rolling Stones in 1969, when he was 19 or 20.

    An earlier but different song with the same title from 1955.

    https://archive.org/details/78_telephone-blues_little-george-smith-smith-lung_gbia0059885b/Telephone+Blues+-+%22Little+George%22+Smith+-+Smith.flac

  25. Actually, here is a 1967 live performance (great audio, no video) of Telephone Blues, by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, with Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood on drums, and John McVie (the three who left to form Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac)

    https://youtu.be/74YdWDFdSDo

  27. I should qualify that “great audio” on my last comment. It’s not bad, but not close to the studio recording with Clapton. There is a lot of good audio and video from when Fleetwood Mac first started performing, though. They performed Black Magic Woman then, which was written by Peter Green.

  29. This runs in cycles. The gen coming up — the kids in their sub-teens — are likely to eschew a lot of tech for more personal interaction. They’ll have phones, etc., they’re too convenient, but they’ll use them to arrange F2F meeting, not in place of them. And they’ll likely have a lot more attention to each other than to their phones when doing it, unlike the current gen. It’s an odd thing. I just met a guy from Cuba, he’s only been here in the USA for 5y, but he has the same face-in-phone that is typical for someone his age. Interesting that it has infected him, too…

  30. Moscow Calling, by Gorky Park. Was kinda hit at 80s. Sometimes misheard as “Mascarpone”.

  31. “Calling Baton Rouge” by Garth Brooks is doubly dated – it is not just about long-distance calling a girl one has been charmed by, but shoveling handfuls of coins into pay phones to do so. They still go wild down in cajun country when Garth rolls into town and plays this one.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16lW-NWqLTQ

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