Song Lyric Sunday: Everybody Gonna Dance Tonight

This week’s Song Lyric Sunday gives us a theme chosen by Jim himself. As he tells us in his brilliantly titled post Whistler’s Mother we are invited to play songs that incorporate whistling. At first this might cause a little head scratching, but when you think about it there have been quite a few – some of them more mainstream than others.

I did think about playing you Whistling Jack Smith’s UK novelty hit I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman for a laugh: those who know the song will see what I mean by that. But I decided on three more – one of which I have played for SLS before, but as that was eighteen months ago and even Jim didn’t remember it in a comments chat the other day I think I’m on safe ground with the repeat.

For the opener, I’m going with a former Beatle. It’s a simple little tune, but the video is superb:

As you might expect, the lyrics aren’t exactly Nobel Prize-winning stuff, but here they are anyway (no matter what I tried, the formatting still went a little haywire!):

Everybody gonna dance tonight
Everybody gonna feel alright
Everybody gonna dance around tonight

 

Everybody gonna dance around
Everybody gonna hit the ground
Everybody gonna dance around tonight

 

Well you can come on to my place if you want to
You can do anything you want to do

 

Everybody gonna dance tonight
Everybody gonna feel alright
Everybody gonna dance around tonight

 

Well  you can come on to my place if you want to
You can do anything you want to do

 

Everybody gonna stamp their feet
Everybody’s gonna feel the beat
Everybody gonna dance around tonight

Everybody’s gonna dance tonight
Everybody gonna feel alright

 

Everybody gonna dance around tonight

Everybody gonna jump and shout
Everybody’s gonna sing it out
Everybody gonna dance around tonightWell you can come on to my place if you want to
You can do anything you want to doEverybody gonna dance tonight
Everybody gonna feel alright
Everybody gonna dance around tonight
Everybody gonna dance around tonight
Everybody’s gonna feel alright tonight

 

Writer/s: PAUL MCCARTNEY

Publisher: Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Paul McCartney released Dance Tonight as a single in June 2007, and it peaked at #26 in the UK and #69 in the US. The left-handed mandolin used for the song, shown being delivered to him by a postman who bears a striking resemblance to Mackenzie Crook, was bought by Paul from a guitar shop he used in London. Whenever he played the instrument his then three-year-old daughter Beatrice would start dancing, after which he is quoted as saying that the song “wrote itself”. It is a happy little tune, in keeping with its origins, and I love the video. That is Natalie Portman, by the way, if you hadn’t recognised her. The song was the opening track on Paul’s fourteenth solo album, Memory Almost Full, which was released at the same time and got to #5 in the UK and #3 in the US.

For my second tune today I’m giving you the one I played before. It is a little gem of a song, about getting over a lost love: the whistling comes in near the end, marking the singer’s happiness at moving on. This the delightful Noah Cyrus:

Noah has been making music since 2016, following a career as a child actor, and has released several EPs and her first full album, The Hardest Part, which came out in September 2022 and reached #13 on the US Heat chart (the ‘bubbling under’ one), #6 on the UK Americana chart and #10 on the UK Country listing. This song was a track on an eight song EP, The End Of Everything, which came out in May 2020, making #124 in the US Albums chart and #88 in the UK Album Downloads one. It had, though, been previously released as a single in July 2019, when it reached #85 in the US and #66 in the UK. It seems that I’m not alone in liking this one: that video has more than 79m YouTube views!

And now for something completely different, as a certain Mr Python used to say. If you didn’t get my earlier reference to Whistling Jack Smith  – sorry! It was an instrumental, featuring a guy (John O’Neill, a singer and trumpeter with the Mike Sammes Singers) whistling the tune, which rendered it a little useless for Song Lyric Sunday purposes. Somehow, it made #5 in the UK in March 1967 and even got to #20 in the US. But we Brits had previous when it came to whistling in hit tunes, as this one had peaked at #4 here in October 1966:

The New Vaudeville Band were a novelty act, who were put together by songwriter Geoff Stephens specifically to record his new song, Winchester Cathedral. This became a very good move: not only did the song make #4 here, it also got to #1 in the US, Australia, Canada and South Africa! They had three further hit singles in 1967 after which the novelty wore off, as is wont to happen in such cases. And just for fun, if you really want to hear the Whistling Jack Smith tune, you’ll find it here. That isn’t actually the real whistler, just an actor miming for tv purposes when they found they had a hit on their hands!

That’s all for today, a pretty mixed bunch even by my standards. I hope you had fun with them, though: I did!

See you again for Tuesday Tunes, I trust?