John, Paul, George, and Bonzo

"Na, na, na, na-na, na na
Na-na na na, Hey Jude"

It's Tertius's voice alone, but I'm assuming he's singing along with the Beatles on his iTouch.

It's a busy year to be a Brit, even a half-American expatriate, with the Dickens bicentenary, the Diamond jubilee, and the Olympics. And we're shortly heading into a slew of golden anniversaries for the Fab Four, kicking off -- pleasingly but utterly coincidentally -- on my birthday this year, with the fiftieth anniversary of the first photograph to include Ringo in the line-up.

Regular visitors to these parts will be satiated with my adoration of the Beatles, so let me instead send you to an essay for the BBC by that fine commentator, Adam Gopnik, that says it better than I could. But I note his point -- as Tertius demonstrates -- about the timeless appreciation of the group (the Beatles were never a "band," except when masquerading as Sergeant Pepper and his cronies):  If, like our children, we baby boomers had admired music that was coming to fruition half a century earlier, we'd have been singing songs from before World War I.

Yes, I'm often found in the shower warbling Vesta Victoria's "Look What Percy Picked Up in the Park." And who can forget Harry MacDonough's "When I Was Twenty-one and You Were Sweet Sixteen"? (Certainly not Harry, who got eighteen months without the option. At least John and Paul waited until she was just seventeen.*)

But in the way of things, another hit from 1912 was the American Quartet performing a barbershop arrangement of "Moonlight Bay." And somewhat later, with a somewhat different quartet, who had little use for a barbershop, unless of course it was showing photographs of every head the barber had the pleasure to know . . .

 

*Know what I mean?