#954. Lineage of Song: “Peggy Sue”

 

Pealing back the curtain a bit, because the timing won’t at all bear this out. I’ve been compiling these well in advance of posting them. For me, yesterday was 9/7, which 88 years earlier was when Buddy Holly was born.

And while it was a few months ago for me, setting up “Cecilia,” the posted version was a few weeks ago. That one features two different music acts in collaboration. This one is Buddy Holly writing a sequel to his own song (a few minutes ago I posted “That’s All Right, Mama” vaguely referencing a different “follow up;” sometimes I’m very cavalier in these posts). 

I had a mentor when I was a kid who inadvertently encouraged getting into Buddy Holly, which I took for a lifelong commitment, but “Peggy Sue Got Married” (despite eventually inspiring a whole movie) wasn’t really a part of that experience, since it’s absent from the greatest hits collection I took most of my experience with his music from, so it’s surreal to listen to it, now, to think Holly somehow wrote a coda to a life cut far too short. I can probably do some research, but apart from these examples I’m not aware of a ton of outright sequel songs. 

#953. Lineage of Song “Wellerman”

The Longest Johns

Nathan Evans 

The Albany Shantymen

Wellington Sea Chanty Society

Kind of crazy that it took me this long to include “Wellerman” in the Lineage of Song, since it’s basically the song, as sung by Nathan Evans, that got me into this gear all over again. 

#952. Lineage of Song: “Just the Two of Us”

 

Bill Withers

Will Smith

That Will Smith started out in a hip hop act and was for years best known for that increasingly feels like a historical curiosity. In fact the last time he released new music was twenty years ago and even that felt like an afterthought. How he survived the horrible publicity and the act itself of the Oscars slap, too…

#951. Lineage of Song: “Cecilia”

Simon & Garfunkel 

Ace of Base

Here’s one of my personal favorites, and the first (but not last) time Ace of Base shows up in these posts (these particular Swedes ended up having a pretty deep appreciation for the lineage of song). In this one they literally write a whole song about another song, a sequel song, as it were.