Friday, August 12, 2016

Summer Music

Each year, a new batch of hot summer songs hits
airwaves and earbuds, dominating top-40 charts and iTunes sales. But there are
a handful of popular tunes that never fade away, ever present throughout the
world’s streets on sunny summer days: The familiar jingle of ice cream trucks.

You can probably hear it in your head: A jingling,
old-timey ditty echoing down the streets of your neighbourhood. It was your cue
as a kid to start sprinting down the sidewalks, coins clutched in your fist,
ready to buy that frozen treat.

But where did this summer hallmark come from? Why
are ice cream trucks some of the only vehicles that play music as one of their
main functions?

The ancestors of the modern ice cream truck are some
of the earliest vehicles, period. They’ve existed for centuries — even before
the advent of automobiles.

Roman emperor Nero Claudius Caesar (37-68 A.D.) is
rumoured to have sent runners to the mountains to fetch snow to be flavoured
with fruit juices. The rest is sweet history: Since then, vendors have
undergone a mobility upgrade, hawking frozen treats from push-carts, horse- or
goat-drawn carriages and, finally, automobiles.

No one can say for certain who invented the ice
cream truck (known in the UK as an ice cream van), or even ice cream, for that
matter. But evidence suggests ice cream trucks precede the advent of the
soft-serve variety that ice cream trucks specialise in.

According to ice cream lore, New York-based Thomas
Carvellos began slinging cones from his truck in 1929. On one particular
outing, his truck hit a bump that caused a flat tyre, leaving him stranded with
a supply of rapidly melting ice cream. Rather than calling it a day, he
continued selling the melty confections, which customers seemed to enjoy more
than the fully frozen dessert. And thus, it is said, the Carvel soft-serve
business was born.

But a problem remained: How would one lure customers
to these moving dessert dispensaries? Music: That was the trick to bridge the
gap between mobility and marketing.

(Credit: Davis Staedtler / Flickr Creative Commons)

The first ice cream jingle?

For Ohio-based candymaker Harry Burt — whose
chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick was a stroke of genius in itself —
covering his truck in bells not long after soft-serve’s invention was a
game-changer.

When he began selling his sweets from a truck, he
fitted it with sleigh bells that jingled along his sales route, announcing his
presence in neighbourhoods along the way. The bells worked so well, Burt added
them to 12 more trucks. Thus, the very first fleet of Good Humor ice cream
trucks appeared.

It was so successful as a marketing gimmick, that it
wasn’t long before the tinkling of bells morphed into full songs.

A savvy California businessman named Paul Hawkins
replaced the simple bells on his Good Humor trucks cylindrical device equipped
with nails that cranked out a tune, said Daniel Neely, author of Ding, Ding!:
The Commodity Aesthetic of Ice Cream Truck Music, a 2014 paper published in the
journal The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. Using this custom music
box, Hawkins’ trucks played the Eastern European folk tune “Stodola Pumpa”.

By the 1950s, electrical engineer Bob Nichols had
taken the mechanical music box even further. He manufactured music devices
specifically for ice cream trucks, featuring a library of jingles from which
vendors could choose a song.

Nichols’ son Mark, who now runs Nichols Electronics,
said that the most widely used ice cream truck jingle in the US today is The
Entertainer. It’s a classic ragtime tune that dates back to the early 1900s,
but reappeared in the pop culture spotlight when it was used as the theme to
the 1970s film The Sting. In France, you might hear ice cream trucks blaring an
old-timey rendition of Frère Jacques.

The weird appeal of folk songs

At this point, the ice cream truck industry had
ushered in some of the earliest marketing jingles ever. And for some strange
reason, they were often traditional folk songs native to the region. In the UK
and Australia, for instance, the traditional English folk song Greensleeves is
the most-used ice cream van jingle, to this day.

Greensleeves is a bit of a jingle anomaly, because
of its minor key, which doesn’t typically evoke the childlike glee brought
about by other songs. Minor keys often sound lower, duller, sadder, darker.
That’s why we don’t often hear them in advertising jingles.

As the story goes, in 1958, Dominic Facchino founded
the Mr Whippy ice cream van company in Birmingham, England, after visiting the
US and witnessing the success of Mister Softee trucks. Robby Staff, who owns
and operates a collection of vintage Mr Whippy vans in Queensland, Australia,
said that Facchino was a big fan of Henry VIII, who throughout history has been
credited with personally writing Greensleeves. Even the Mr Whippy logo, a
cherub-faced ice cream cone, dons a beret that Staff said is a subtle nod to
Henry’s preferred headwear.

Robby Staff

Staff still sells ice cream from his vintage van
owned by Robby Staff in Australia, where his family has been in the business
since the 1960s. (Credit: Robby Staff)

Mr Whippy vans flourished in the UK, and the company
soon expanded to Australia and then New Zealand, dominating all three mobile ice
cream markets by the mid-1960s, pre-dating fast food’s popularity in those
markets.

“In Australia, there was no McDonald’s or Kentucky
Fried Chicken at the time. There was Mr Whippy, and this made such an imprint,”
said Staff, who also contributed to the book The Mr Whippy Story. Over time, Mr
Whippy became a generic term, he said, referring to the fact that people called
all mobile ice cream vendors “Mr Whippies.” The company’s signature
Greensleeves jingle, too, was adopted by other vendors. Voila: The jingle and
truck became permanently linked, building brand recognition and revealed a
relationship between advertising and mobility.

Although certain tunes are more popular than others
in different countries, there’s one commonality that links ice cream vehicle
jingles worldwide: The songs simply don’t change much as musical trends evolve.
They are — pun intended — frozen in time. But why? And what’s with all the folk
songs?

The jingle’s evolution — or lack thereof

In a way, the idea that ice cream jingles have only
minimally evolved is completely at odds with the idea of jingles in general:
The catchy earworms that were once the advert industries’ Trojan horse into the
brains of consumers on radio waves and in TV commercials are now largely looked
at as cheesy and outdated trinkets from yesteryear.

Matthew Nicholl, chairman of Contemporary Writing
and Production at Berklee College of Music, has developed and taught classes
focusing on jingle-writing, has personally written scores for use in film, TV
and radio advertisements, even political campaigns: PBS, Nasa, Maybelline
cosmetics, Subway sandwiches, and even campaigns for US presidential candidates
Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan. He’s noticed that, since the mid-1990s, musical
tracks produced for TV advertisements aren’t really jingles anymore.

“It’s what you’d call a spot, which is more like a
soundtrack to a film,” Nicholl said. “In many cases, companies license existing
songs rather than commission jingles. Lots of time when you’re contracted to
write a jingle, they want it to sound like a popular song.”

Even though traditional jingles are fading from
advertising, Nicholl says they still have a market in places like local and
regional radio advertisements… and ice cream trucks.

“People really want to recreate that nostalgia for
that hot summer day when ice cream was the perfect summer day for you as a
kid,” Nicholl said.

(Credit: Beverley Goodwin / Flickr Creative Commons)

Jingles, trucks, and nostalgia

Since nostalgia is what keeps those old-fashioned
ice cream jingles alive, it’s why you won’t hear them blare the latest Rihanna
single. Current pop hits don’t play off that need for nostalgia, and plus,
people won’t immediately associate the song with a moving truck that sells ice
cream the way a jingle does.

“People have tried to use popular music and people
don’t recognise what it is. People hear jingles, and the kids know that is the
ice cream man,” Nichols of Nichols Electronics said. If a truck were to play a
modern-day song instead of a classic jingle, he said, people would wonder, “Was
that an ice cream vendor or somebody just playing music real loud?”

There’s also the fact that quaint classics are
simply recognisable everywhere, across generations and cultures. And because
these songs are so old, they’re part of public domain and available to use free
of charge.

Neely agreed, adding that the power of nostalgia is
hugely important in the marketing something as innocent and sweet as ice cream.
He illustrated this very concept in his academic paper, citing a 2003 project
as an example. In this project, New York artist Erin McGonigle composed a
collection of re-imagined ice cream truck tunes. She embarked on several
ride-alongs documenting the effectiveness of each tune. Of them all, the song
that garnered the best immediate response (ice cream customers) was a marching
band’s rendition of Turkey in the Straw, which happens to be among the most
widely used tunes by ice cream truck vendors.

However, there are some newer tunes that have proven
adequate sales tools. The Mister Softee jingle is, perhaps, today’s “best-known
ice cream truck tune,” Neely wrote — and it’s a fairly new tune compared to
other popular ice cream truck jingles.

US-based Mister Softee, which operates in 15 states
and China, hired jingle writer Les Waas to produce a jingle for a radio
advertisement in 1960. The song was such a commercial success that it was
converted to an instrumental chime version to be blasted from trucks,
solidifying its status as the most widely recognized modern ice cream jingle.
The tinkling tune is remarkably unchanged even today, “known to millions of
people and a cultural icon throughout the United States,” Neely wrote in his
article.

With the advent of supermarkets in the late 20th
century, the number of ice cream trucks has taken a big hit: In the 1960s, the
UK saw over 30,000 ice cream vans on the streets; today, there may be less than
5,000.

Even international ice cream truck mainstays like
Mister Softee and Mr Whippy are moving toward more brick-and-mortar shops. The
survival of the iconic ice cream truck is also dependent on the technological
forces at play in transportation: Will we someday see self-driving, autonomous
cars dishing out ice cream, using big data to pinpoint neighbourhoods with high
demand or with high populations?

Whatever the future for this summertime vehicle
holds, it’s clear that, as long as they’re on the move, they will still use
jingles. The retro appeal of these increasingly uncommon flashbacks-on-wheels
is what keeps the public’s love of them alive — and the traditional jingles
alive, too.

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This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
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