Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We are so glad
you're here because today we are testing a hypothesis.
Oh, okay. I'm intrigued. The hypothesis is that
the simplest, most innocent sounding songs, they
often have the most cutthroat histories. Right.
It's the duck syndrome, isn't it? Calm on the
surface, just paddling furiously underneath.
Exactly. And the specimen we've got on the table
today is a tune that I guarantee, I 99 % guarantee
you associate with early childhood okay maybe
a nursery or you know a kindergarten classroom
the song is a you're adorable ah yes the quintessential
earworm you hear that first line a you're adorable
and your brain just automatically fills in b
you're so beautiful it does it feels like it
belongs to the public domain you're like twinkle
twinkle little star or something but it doesn't
and that is where our deep dive begins we're
looking at the archival records the chart data
the recording logs for the song and what we found
Well, it isn't a nursery rhyme. Not at all. It's
a case study in the post -war music industry,
a three -way battle for chart dominance, and
a lesson in how physical media, vinyl, and shellac
actually shaped what people listen to all over
the world. And, we have to mention, it eventually
involves a blue monster eating the alphabet.
We will definitely get to the monster, but I
want to start with the context. We're looking
at 1948. The war is over. The baby boom is just
revving up. What's the musical landscape looking
like when this song lands? It's a fascinating
transition period. Swing bands are starting to
fade and the crooner is becoming the dominant
force. But the industry itself was structurally
different than what we know today. How so? Today,
the artist is the product. You buy a Taylor Swift
record because it's Taylor Swift. In 1948, the
song was the product. Right, the composition
itself. The publishers held the power. When a
song like A You're Adorable was written, the
goal wasn't to find one artist to record it.
The goal was to get every artist to record it
simultaneously. You wanted to flood the market.
You wanted to flood the market. Which explains
why the charts in 1949 look so bizarre to modern
eyes. You could have three different versions
of the exact same song in the top 20 at the same
time. And that's exactly what happened here.
Precisely. But let's look at the architects first.
Who actually built this thing? Okay, so the credits
list a trio. The music was by Sid Lipman. And
the lyrics came from a team, Buddy K and Fred
Wise. Now, looking at their other work, I mean,
these weren't amateurs. Buddy K wrote for Sinatra
and Sarah Vaughan. They were pros. Absolute pros.
And they understood a specific genre that was
huge at the time. The list song. Give us the
technical breakdown. What makes a list song work
so well? It's basically a mnemonic device disguised
as pop music. Humans love order. We love catalogs.
Cole Porter was the master of this. Think of
let's do it. Let's fall in love. It's just a
list of animals that fall in love. Or these foolish
things, which is just a list of objects that
remind the singer of their ex. Exactly. It provides
a scaffold. Lipman, Gay, and Wise just took the
most fundamental scaffold in the English language,
the alphabet. It's almost aggressively efficient.
They didn't have to think about narrative arcs
or emotional bridges. They just needed, what,
26 compliments? And it worked. The song was published
in 1948, and by early 1949, the cover war began.
And this brings us to our heavyweight title fight.
In the blue corner, representing RCA Victor,
we have Perry Como. Mr. C. The king of relaxation.
The man who could make singing look like he was
taking a nap. And in the red corner, for Capitol
Records, we have the powerhouse duo of Joe Stafford
and Gordon McRae. And this wasn't a small skirmish.
I mean, this was a battle for the soul. of the
1949 jukebox perry como went into the studio
on march 1st 1949 he brought the fontaine sisters
with him for backing vocals i want to pause on
the perry como sound for a second why was he
the front runner here he had a warmth that was
just perfect for this specific song a you're
adorable is intimate it's not a belter it requires
a certain Gentleness to pull off without sounding
cheesy. Como had mastered that intimate microphone
hugging technique. And the charts backed him
up. His version hit number one on the U .S. Billboard
chart on April 9th, 1949. A certified smash.
But here's the interesting technical detail from
the RCA archives. They didn't just release it
on the standard 78 RPM records. The big breakable
shellac discs. Right. RCA was in the middle of
a format war. They were trying to launch the
45 RPM vinyl single, that little 7 -inch disc
with the big hole in the middle. They used Perry
Como in the song as a battering ram to push that
new technology. So if you wanted the hit version
of the Alphabet song, you might have been forced
to buy a new record player to spin it. That's
the idea. It's the 1949 equivalent of an exclusive
streaming release. But Capitol Records wasn't
sitting this out. Joe Stafford and Gordon McRae
released their version around the same time.
And Joe Stafford is no slouch. She was technically
one of the most proficient singers of the century.
Absolutely. Perfect pitch. And their version
was huge. It debuted on March 25th, 1949 and
peaked at number four. Think about that for a
second. The number one song in the country is
A Year Adorable. And the number four song in
the country is also A Year Adorable. It's what?
It really highlights how the song was king. People
liked the melody and the lyrics so much they
were willing to consume multiple interpretations
of it all at the same time. And just to add to
the chaos, there was a third player, a dark horse.
Tony Passer and his orchestra, recording for
Columbia Records. And on vocals, the Clooney
sisters. Which included a young Rosemary Clooney.
The very same. long before she became a massive
solo star and a Hollywood icon. So what happened
with their version? Their version hit the charts
in May 1949. It wasn't quite the juggernaut the
others were. It only stayed for two weeks and
peaked at number 12, but it still cracked the
top 20. So at one point in the spring of 1949,
you had Como at number one, Stafford and McRae
at four, and Pastor and Clooney at 12. The airways
were just saturated with the alphabet. It was
total market dominance by a single composition.
And for the songwriters, this is the passive
income dream. Every time any of those versions
played, they got paid. Now, we tend to think
of these chart battles as purely American phenomena,
but the music business was global even then.
I want to pivot to how this song traveled, because
the archival notes on the international releases
reveal something really weird about marketing.
The flip side strategy. Right. The B -side. Today,
on Spotify, there's no back of the track. But
on vinyl, you had two sides of real estate. And
what you put on the back told you a lot about
who you thought was buying the record. It's a
fascinating little map of regional tastes. The
A side, A, you're adorable. That was the global
constant. That was the hit. But the B side changed,
you know, depending on the country. So let's
look at the U .S. release first, Pericomo. What
did Americans get on the flip side? They got
a track called When Is Sometime. Which... Frankly,
has been completely lost to history. I don't
think I've ever heard it. It didn't stick. It
was a standard filler ballad. But when the record
crossed the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, released
on the His Master's Voice label, they changed
the pairing. What did the British audience get?
They got Forever and Ever. That's a much stronger
title. That sounds like they were doubling down
on the romance angle. You're adorable on side
A, forever and ever on side B. That's a date
night record. It's a cohesive package. But the
one that really stands out to me is the Japanese
release. This is the one from Victor Entertainment?
Yes. In Japan, they paired A, You're Adorable
with Bolly High. Bolly High in the Showstopper
from South Pacific. The very same. That's a massive
song. That's not a B -side. That's a double A
-side. Well, it makes sense if you think about
the cost of importing or pressing Western music
in post -war Japan. You want to maximize the
value for the consumer. You give them two absolute
giants on one disc. It's like buying a single
ticket and seeing Gone with the Wind in Casablanca
back to back. Exactly. And then you have Australia.
They went a completely different direction. They
paired it with My Melancholy Baby. A jazz standard
from way back in 1912. It's an interesting choice.
It suggests they were marketing to an older demographic,
perhaps. Someone who wanted that nostalgic pre
-war jazz feel on the back and the modern pop
hit on the front. And it worked. The data shows
A, your adorable hit number one in Australia
as well. So this thing conquered North America,
Europe, and Oceania. It was a global phenomenon.
And because of that saturation, the song managed
to survive the death of the 78 format. It migrated
to the LP. Then to the cassette tape. Ah, the
gas station cassette. The best hits of the 40s
compilations. That's how a lot of Gen X and older
millennials first heard the song, probably in
the backseat of a car. And this is the big pivot.
There's a very specific reason why younger millennials
and Gen Z recognize this melody. And it has nothing
to do with Carrie Como or chart battles. No,
it has to do with the educational pivot. We're
moving from the recording studio to the television
set, specifically 123 Sesame Street. This is
the song's second life. And, you know, arguably
it's more enduring life. We're talking about
the very first season of Sesame Street in 1969.
Now, Sesame Street was revolutionary because
it used the aesthetics of commercials and pop
culture to sell literacy. So how did they repurpose
a 1948 love song? They kept the premise remarkably
intact, at least at first. The sketch features
a Muppet named Jack. He looks a bit like a beatnik,
very 60s. And he's singing to his girlfriend,
a muppet named Adrienne. So the romance is still
there. It is. Jack is crooning. Hey, you're adorable.
And to reinforce the lesson, they have these
alphabet blocks coming down a conveyor belt.
A, B, C. That's brilliant pedagogy. You have
the auditory cue, the song, the visual cue, the
blocks. And the narrative cue, the love story.
Until the antagonist arrives. The agent of chaos.
The key monster. Now, we should probably clarify
for you listening. This is season one, Cookie
Monster. He wasn't quite the lovable, googly
-eyed, plush toy we know today. He was a bit
scarier. He was cure -eyed. He was hunger personified.
He enters the scene, scares Adrian away, so the
romance is officially dead, and claims the blocks.
He tells Jack, these are my blocks. So the song
shifts gears. It stops being a serenade and becomes
a negotiation for survival. It does. Jack realizes
he needs to get through the song to get the blocks,
too. Well, to keep the monster appeased. The
source material notes he sings a looser form
of the song. He's rushing. Like, okay, F, you're
a flower. G, you're good looking. Just take the
blocks. And as he hands them over. Cookie Monster
does the only thing Cookie Monster knows how
to do. He eats them. He eats them. One by one.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. It's such a subversive
piece of comedy. They took a song that had been
treated with such reverence by Perry Como, so
smooth, gentle, romantic, and turned it into
a sketch about a monster eating educational supplies.
But that sketch is likely why the song is still
known today. It stripped the song of its 1940s
context. For a child watching in 1975 or 1985,
this wasn't an oldie. It was the Cookie Monster
song. It completely recontextualized the melody.
It proved that the structure of the song, the
list, was stronger than its original theme. That's
the key insight. Lipman, Kay, and Wise built
such a sturdy vessel with that alphabet structure
that you could swap out the cargo. You could
take out romance and put in literacy, and the
ship still sails. It makes me think about the
nature of pop culture longevity. Usually we think
a song survives because it's timeless or emotionally
deep. But in this case, it survived because it
was useful. Utility is a huge factor in cultural
survival. It was useful for Perry Como to sell
45s. It was useful for Japanese labels to sell
double features. And it was useful for the children's
television workshop to teach the ABCs. So if
we zoom out, what's the lesson here? We've traveled
from a 1948 publishing house to a 1949 chart
war, across the ocean to Japan and Australia,
and finally to a brownstone in New York City.
I think the lesson is that once a song leaves
the songwriter's hands, the culture owns it.
And the culture will do whatever it needs to
do with it. It's a living organism. Exactly.
In 1949, the culture needed reassurance and romance
after the war, so it was a love song. In 1969,
the culture needed to educate a new generation
of kids, so it became a lesson. The song adapted.
It's a testament to that list song format, too.
You can't really do that with a complex narrative
ballad. You can't repurpose Bohemian Rhapsody
to teach the alphabet. Well, the Muppets did
try that with Bohemian Rhapsody, but that was
pure chaos. With A, you're adorable. The structure
is the hook. It leads to a provocative thought
for the future. We're currently living in the
TikTok era, where snippets of songs go viral
for very specific memes or dances. Right. If
we look 30 or 40 years into the future, Which
of today's chart toppers is going to get the
A, your adorable treatment? Which Drake or Olivia
Rodrigo song is going to be repurposed to teach
algebra or history in the year 2060? That is
a terrifying thought. Imagine a future educational
AI singing WAP to teach plumbing mechanics. OK,
OK, let's not go there. But the point stands.
It does. The melodies that seem disposable today
might be the educational tools of tomorrow. If
a romantic ballad from 1948 can become a snack
for Cookie Monster, nothing is safe. It changes
how you listen to the radio. You aren't just
hearing a hit, you're hearing raw material for
some future reinvention. And you're hearing a
battleground. Just remember, for every simple
song you hear, there are probably three record
executives fighting over who got to release it
on the B -side in Australia. A complex history
for a simple tune. Next time you find yourself
humming A, You're Adorable, just remember, you
are humming a chart -topping, globe -trotting,
monster -feeding survivor. And maybe check your
local listings to see if Perry Como is still
at number one. Thanks for taking this deep dive
with us. Keep your ears open.