iPod track #5823 - Rosemary Clooney and The Hi-Lo's - "Don'cha Go 'Way Mad"

I have a 2000s-era iPod, and it contains exactly 29,804 songs that can never be updated because I have no more iTunes. Everything is inside that little flat box forever. None of it is leaving. It lives on a speaker dock in my kitchen. I wash dishes to whatever comes out of it.

Connected to this situation, I wrote about "Death Tone" from Hive Mind roughly one year ago. It's now about 1300 songs later and I'm still on the letter "D" through a song-by-song alphabetical listening trip. If you want to catch up here's the link to that earlier piece.

Anyway, I love Rosemary Clooney.

At first she was the lady singing about toilet paper. That was all I knew about her. Her name was meaningless to me because it was 1978 and I was 14 and had seen White Christmas on TV but didn't realize the woman singing in the commercial was the same person from the movie. I don't think she really registered at all. At that point I was not the one in my home buying the paper towels or "bathroom tissue," and their budget-friendliness was not something I considered.

Of course, the more annual visits I made to White Christmas (and the more I connected her to the Coronet brand of paper products) the more her presence meant to me. She was Vera-Ellen's "mother hen" and, consequently, everyone else's, and she was well positioned in that maternal, morally correct role. When women are singing, an alto voice is what gets my attention first, so in the movie when she sang "Count Your Blessings" and "Love, You Didn't Do Right by Me," her enveloping warmth lodged itself in my mind and never left.

"In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" was probably the next song I heard from her, several years later, and it's a song that begins with a recitation of picnic foods, so that was immediately appealing. By that point, because of White Christmas, I knew her voice right away. "Is Rosemary Clooney singing about ham?" She was.

I started buying her records. "Ring Around Rosie" from 1957, released with the male vocal group, The Hi-Lo's, is a particular favorite. And it kicks off with "Don'cha Go 'Way Mad."

It's a breezy, happily brazen song about cheating on your boyfriend.

Rosemary has had a "rendezvous." Just one little one. The particulars are not made explicit. But since it was the 50s let's say they Did It and because no one in the media was allowed to talk about that sort of thing they relegated it to horny Pepé-Le-Pew French.

Rosemary continues. It was her boyfriend's cousin, and she says that her wronged lover probably has a right to be upset ("I suppose," she sings). But, the song asks, what if we just decided that it was no big deal?

This version of the song was recorded just a couple years after "White Christmas," a huge hit, a movie in which her Mommy-goodness cements itself into your imagination, a movie where her character flies into a steely, indignant rage and breaks up with "knight in shining armor" Bing Crosby – aka they kissed once and it was barely a relationship – after gossipy Mary Wickes tells her that Bing is guilty of being duplicitous and disloyal to General Waverly, his old pal from World War II. Meanwhile, Mary Wickes heard it all wrong and spread false accusations and no one has a conversation about it and Rosie puts on an impeccable "We Are Through" outfit and gets on a train for New York in an all-timer of a huff. This pure-hearted (and, let's be real, unhinged) Rosie is not the Rosie of "Don'cha Go 'Way Mad."

This new Rosie is not the mother hen, is not the chaste lady singing religious-themed lullabies, is not the woman who freaks out for no reason at all over a badly played game of Telephone. This Rosie would like the song's unhappy man to "forgive and forget," then give her a kiss as a sign that none of her actions amount to any kind of romance-busting crime.

This Rosie is like, "I know, I know, I fucked your cousin. Can you blame me? You come from a hot family, I guess. Howsabout you just pretend I didn't do any of that. Whatsay you and me do a little making out. Got anymore bangable cousins I haven't met yet? I'm here for kicks and that sounds like a good time!"

And it is a good time. It's a quickie, too, under three minutes, perfectly composed with perfect jazz harmonies, a cheeky little song about being bad, pretending otherwise, and getting away with it.