My AA sponsor gave me a copy of The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life, shortly after I heard about it. It’s a very short book and I read it in a single sitting. It’s mostly about a passage in the First Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament, a two-sentence prayer, asking for more territory. Bruce Wilkinson, the book’s author, is an Evangelical, the good kind, the kind that tries to do what Jesus would actually do, as opposed to the fundy (fundamentalist) kind.
Like a lot of Evangelicals, Wilkinson is a compulsive bible reader, and the Prayer of Jabez confused him. He found himself thinking about it a lot. Finally, he brought the prayer up to a number of other ministers, and found similar puzzled feelings about the prayer. Then, he thought, what if the territory was not actual real estate, but spiritual territory? So, he thought, the pragmatic approach is to pray the prayer and see what happens. He did, and suddenly difficult plans and projects he had been considering fell neatly into place. During a cruise, he had a compulsion to leave the boat. He sat at an outdoor café and was approached by a man who asked if he could sit and talk to him. The stranger was having personal problems, and felt this other stranger (Wilkinson) was someone he could talk to. As a minister, Wilkinson had excellent counseling skills and he was able to supply the help the stranger needed. Wilkinson’s point was, after praying this prayer, incidents like this became commonplace, and he was inspired to write this book, which, as I said, became a best seller. So, I figured, what the hell, lemme try the prayer.
Instantly, something strange happened. Although there were just two sentences, counting the commas involved, I was having major difficulties memorizing it. Hell, I have no problems memorizing long songs, what’s going on? The obvious solution to me was to set the words to music. Making up a tune took about a minute. No trouble remembering now, but the weird part was two weeks later I got a call from Frazier Mohawk, who I had made a couple albums with. He had a tourist farm/recording studio outside of Toronto where the Holy Modal Rounders had recorded two albums in 1999. Only one was released, to reasonable acclaim, while the other excellent one lies in limbo, but that’s another story. Frazier said the only gigs his studio had been getting were local churches wanting to record hymns. “So, I was thinking, why not record an album of secular hymns, and naturally, I thought of you.” Naturally? Or supernaturally? (cue up a weird organ chord) Was some kinda weird prayer mojo afoot? Or was there an even weirder coincidence? Anyway, the result was another unreleased album, and another long story.
I tried singing the prayer song in public but I had not, up to then, ever done such a short song. I repeated it. It still felt a little off. I tried repeating it three times, that sounded off, too. So, I stopped singing it. Years later the solution came: add verses to incorporate friends, family, our band, and what the hell, everybody. I had been re-writing folk songs for over a half century, ‘50s rock n’ roll songs for decades, and Great American Songbook songs since the ‘70s. Ah, why not re-write the bible. What the hell, you know? And thus, it was.
My Stoic Jingles are based on stoic aphorisms; Soul Jingles are ones I made up. I was calling these “shorties”, at first. I showed some to my friend (and editor) Benito Vila, and he said, “What do you call these?” I thought, yeah, they’re a thing, they should have a name. Shorties was the first name that came up. I didn’t want to call them anything fancy. Maybe they were inspired when I put a Dorothy Parker poem to music some years back and realized a song can be really short:

Life is a cycle of glorious song
A melody extemporaria
Love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I’m Queen Marie of Romania

Queen Marie was the Princess Di of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Di was much cuter.
I’m not sure when the first Soul Jingle showed up. Maybe 2021. They started showing up, thanks to the Muses and weed (the latter is definitely not AA-approved). Meanwhile, I kept running into references to stoicism. Maybe the first place was in Tom Wolfe’s novel, A Man in Full. Previously, I knew nothing about stoicism. I thought it simply meant putting up with pain and discomfort without complaining. But the more I began to understand it, the more sense it made. Then I ran into a list of 50 stoic aphorisms, and thought, “Hey, these are good song lyrics”. Lucid, smart and useful. I wasn’t sure what the exact definition of aphorism was, then I read somewhere that “aphorism” means “sentence”. That smelled a little off, so I looked up aphorism some more. “A pithy observation that contains a general truth”; “a concise statement of scientific principle”; “a short, clever saying that is intended to express a general truth”. OK. During a band discussion, someone came up with Soul Jingles, and that’s the one we decided to go with. Then, Mark Bingham, who produced this album, referred to Stoic Jingles, and I decided it was a good idea for there to be a distinction.
One thing that’s often annoyed me in song lyrics is the lazy padding that happens so often. Traditionally, this involves a verse in which there are only two lines of actual writing:

Don’t let the kiddygedin, the kiddygedin, the kiddygedin
Don’t let the kiddygedin
Or I’ll have to get up and let the kitty get out

That’s from the early ‘50s. Be thankful you missed it. And then there are songs that have a pretty good line, that gets repeated endlessly. More common, of course, is a bad line or phrase that gets repeated endlessly. My take on all this is, it’s a lazy ploy on the part of writers who don’t have anything, or very much, to say. With the Stoic Jingles and the Soul Jingles, I thought, here are statements that are worthy of repetition, and worth holding in your consciousness. I apply the idea of “grab the smooth handle” several times a week. My interpretation of that is: take the simple approach. An idea like “every person is an opportunity for kindness” truly inspires me to be kind to jerks, personalize random encounters, and generally “see” other people. That’s true, too, of “learn something from everyone”. Several years ago, I realized every person who has ever lived knows something I don’t know that would be to my advantage to know. Really, everyone. I really believe that. And I really realize, maybe, it’s not true. I think Soul Jingles and Stoic Jingles could well be used to program children with good information. And they’re good for grown-ups, too. Like Cream of Wheat.