Songs that were scary when I was age 5
The world is different in the eyes of a child.
Music that may seem funny to us as adults can be just outright scary to some children especially around five years old.
It seems that I had no problem with music after 5 years but the music before five years old still haunts me. In this blog I am going to give you a peak into my mind as a child and how I felt about songs that may be perceived as simple and playful to an adult.
Henry Hall & His Orchestra - The Teddy Bear's Picnic
Old Henry who started this all
It seems that this composer had the intention of screwing with children's minds when he wrote this. He includes the swinging sounds of symphony interludes but the verse is sung with a dark tone moving us step by step to the horror of Teddy Bears escaping the house to be outside in a picnic escapade.
There should be nothing scary about the song until he says,
"It's safer to stay at home."
The ending trombone makes me wonder if a child was swallowed up in the woods at the end.
Jim Croce - Bad, Bad Leroy Brown
The moustache guy
It's not so much the song, but it is the album cover itself that scared the pants off me. I don't know what it was about Jim Croce. May dad had plenty of friends more scary than Jim Croce but the picture of Jim Croce on that album spooked me out. I think it was the full mustache and the wrinkles.
I remember dancing to this album and the turn table and swinging my hips to the beat. I loved the folk tone and upbeat melody. I thought Leroy Brown was so cool and nodded my head with my brother shouting,
"The baddest man in the whole damn town!"
We felt cool about the heels and diamond rings, the continental and el dorado, but when it got to the 32 gun and the razor in his shoe we shivered, but then we sang along with the chorus.
"Badder than old King Kong. Meaner than a junk yard dog."
My brother was two years older than me and he loved the song. But I stopped dancing when I heard about Leroy's fight.
This spooked me out.
"Leroy looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone."
What spooked me the most about this song was the day my dad said we are going over to the South Side to meet his friend Leroy. He said it is so far south it is almost in Indiana. I was amazed that we were going to India to meet Leroy Brown the baddest dude in the whole damn town. He turned out to be my dad's yoga instructor.
The Beatles - Come together
The boogey man's song
The bass makes this sounds like a fun song of unity, but to a five year old it is a major freak out. From the point of Juju eyeball all I can see is a creep coming after me. It's like this is the song of the boogey man to me when I am five years old. Yet this is a song that was played at a lot of my dad's parties.
It's not the toe jam football and monkey finger that freaks me out when I'm five years old.
It's this line:
"I know you! You know me!"
Who is this creep that says he knows me and I should know him? I don't know him unless he was one of those creeps that came to our house last Saturday.
I don't care if he's got feet below his knees. I don't want to come together and feel his disease. It gives me goose bumps and the heavy breathing and shouting come in the back ground didn't help. I was scared out of my pants.
It wasn't just this song but half of the Beatles songs freaked me out. A song starts with "Picture yourself on a boat in a River" sounds beautiful but when you are five it is a nightmare. The blue meanies always freaked me out.
Kids don't really see the big picture at all.
Jefferson Airplane - Go Ask Alice
This is not the best crib song.
I just wish this album was played a lot less or not at all while I was growing up. Korean parents are very big on Prenatal music therapy 태교음악, but Go Ask Alice is not going to plant logical proportion's in children's mind at least not in mine.
I read the anonymous book when I was a teenager and later read Leis Carol's classic. The song did change the way I thought about life and mostly what I thought about Disney's portrayal of Alice and Wonderland.
I was only five years old and already hearing about a red night talking backwards and queen who's off her head. The haunting part is to remember what the doorman said, "Feed your head!"
Ella Jenkins - Miss Mary Mack
This sounds like a sweet kid's song.
I heard her sing it live and I sang along with her in Chicago. She was awesome and actually I was surprised when my dad said she was a woman. I really thought she was a man. It was this song that stuck in mind.
It wasn't the silver buttons or fifteen cents or the elephants that jumped over the fence. It was OK that elephants jumped so high they touched the sky, but how could they not come back until the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July freaked me out enough already. The last Fourth of July party my dad had a dude through a quarter stick of dynamite into the Weber. I was so freaked out I cried half the night. Now on top of that elephants will be falling out the sky on the Fourth of July.
This was horrible. Now this girl all dressed in black is witness that the elephants are in the sky and they will fall from the sky on the Fourth of July. Ella Jenkins fades out at the end of the song but the end was really haunting to me.
Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall
This one was a bonus.
It didn't get into the list along with about a hundred other songs I was exposed to before I was five years old. Most of them are catchy and there is nothing wrong with them except that they freaked me out. Honorable mentions are "Simon and Garfunkel - Frank Lloyd Write", "The Doors - People are strange" and "CCR - Bad Moon". These got stuck in my head as well as that crazy Archie Bunker song "Those were the days".
These songs win the same place in my mind as that guy that wears sandals all the time but has hair coming out of his toes so he looks like bigfoot and the lady that is always pregnant no matter how many babies she has and the chain smoking uncle who can't finish his story about his time in France because he chocked on his last cigarette.
The seventies were great. I'm just glad I can move on.
Maybe my mental age is finally six years old.