Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep

“Lally” Stott (1945–1977)

The Rounders were playing in a bar in Ipswitch, Massachusetts, and I was looking at the jukebox. If there’s a jukebox where I’m playing I always do that. I see, “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”. My mind goes, “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep!?” How could I not give it a listen? Hmm. Really catchy tune and a nice chord use in the second “Far, far away”. I thought it was an American cover of a Jamaican pop song. Nope, the composer is from Lancashire, in the UK. It peaked at #20 in the US charts, but is one of the fewer-than-50 singles that have sold more than 10 million records worldwide. The Observer, a Sunday-only newspaper that is part of the (UK) Guardian Media Group, has named it the all-time number one unintentionally creepy song because of its theme of child abandonment. What’s really funny about that is all along I thought the song referred to “little baby boy”, and while researching the song for these notes I found–– whoops, hallucinating again––no, no, it’s “little baby bird”. Besides having sung little baby boy here, I had added a verse. The original version asks, where’s your mommy gone and where’s your daddy gone? I added a verse in which everybody was gone as well. You want it darker? I usually do. Since the early ‘60s I’ve never had a problem with changing words to a song if I personally felt it would be an improvement. It’s one of the prerogatives/duties (joke alert) of having perfect taste. When Antonia and I finally found the words to “Along Comes Mary”, as a further example, we found some of them a little clunky, and she changed them. I sing that version here. When I hear the word “authentic”, I reach for my revolver.

Lally Stott died when his bicycle was hit by a car.