C: Convoy

 

Convoy

A song by C.W. McCall (real name William Dale Fries, Jr.) about the CB radio craze of the 1970s, "Convoy" reached #1 on Billboard in 1975. The song contained an imagined conversation between truckers via CB radio, with CB slang. Users had handles (call signs or nicknames), which they used to address other truckers while conversing. "Breaker" was how users informed each other of wanting to start a transmission on a  channel. Channel 19 was the mostly commonly used channel, hence the term "Breaker 1-9, this is ..."

The references made in the song (see link above for explanations) may seem foreign to people of today who have grown up on cell phones and text speak. I was only a little girl when the song came out and I have very few, if any, memories of anyone using CB radios. This meme has shown up on the web:

I guess, in a way, that was true. Check out this video to see a CB radio.

The song and the CB/trucking craze inspired a 1978 movie of the same name. Earlier movies, like Duel and Smokey and the Bandit were also inspired by the craze. Trucking and CB radios were then at their peak.

The song must have been a favorite of the producers of The Simpsons, as one episode had Homer singing the song and another had a parody called "Christmas Convoy."

B: Barbie Girl

 

Barbie Girl

This runs piggyback to my Barbie theme last year. Someone who was doing a "silly songs" theme then (similar to my theme this year) mentioned having posted this song. I was not aware of the song until then. It was released in 1997, many years before the movie, and recorded by the Danish-Norwegian dance-pop group Aqua. One of the group's members wrote the song after seeing an exhibit on kitsch culture in Denmark that featured Barbie dolls. I did not know a lot of the "new" songs that came out in the 1990s. Perhaps the success of the Barbie movie has made (or will make) this song more popular now.

From link above:

Mattel sued Aqua for basically slandering the name of Barbie Doll. There was a big brouhaha about it, taken to several courts, but the case was ultimately dismissed. Later Mattel did use the song in promotions, only with a few modified lyrics.

Above is the official video by Aqua. The singer Tori V also recorded the song, and her video is below:

I also found this video of a kids' dance set to "Barbie Girl": 

A: All Together Now

Let Blogging A to Z 2025 begin! My theme this year is Novelty Songs. For Day One, I present:

All Together Now

Written primarily by Paul McCartney (but credited to Lennon and McCartney), "All Together Now" was recorded during the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour period, but not released until it was included on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack.  

From Wikipedia:

McCartney described the song as a children's sing-along with the title phrase inspired by the music hall tradition of asking the audience to join in. He also described a "subcurrent" in the song, a dual-meaning where "we are all together now". According to music critic Tom Maginnis of AllMusic, McCartney created the song "to match the same light-hearted spirit" of "Yellow Submarine."

"All Together Now" appears in an animated sequence in the film Yellow Submarine, and is also introduced by the Beatles themselves in a final live-action scene of the film. During the latter scene, translations of "All Together Now" into various languages appear written on-screen.

 While searching Youtube, I came across this children's version of the song: