The Calendar of Song is a site-specific music service linking listeners with date-specific songs to contribute cultural context and musical enrichment to their daily browsing lives. It currently features 190 regular entries with an additional 100 “day of the week” songs that weave their way throughout the year. The Calendar of Song is a clock, not a robot, but utilizes unique code to plumb the daily dose of song for web presentation. 

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John Giorno working the lines and reels behind “Dial-A-Poem”.

Inspiration for the Calendar of Song includes the groundbreaking “Dial-A-Poem”, launched 1968 in Manhattan by John Giorno, which today features 282 recordings from 132 poets. Giorno drew inspiration from other modern art movements that reimagined visual arts into all varying forms of multimedia; he sought to accomplish the same for poetry as his contemporaries had for painting, music, and sculpture. As a juvenile, I encountered another derivative of “Dial A Poem”, They Might Be Giants’ bonhomme “Dial-A-Song”, which featured an early internet interface that factored greatly into my personal imagination of telephone internet systems to deliver dial up modem access to snippets of culture and music. (After all, you enter the Matrix via telephone, right?) The rich history of Dial-A-Song invites interested readers to peruse altmodisch answering machines and alternative weekly classified ads on the satisfyingly detailed account on TMBG’s fan wiki. A reimagined version of Dial-A-Song remains online today, although the most recent entry is from 2018. 

It was the third of June…

Sometime in June 2021 I tossed on my record player the recent gift of Music from Lil Brown. “Was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day…” The album, released the same year Giorno launched Dial-A-Poem, nods in its title to The Band’s Music from Big Pink. It would be the sole release from the band Africa and is an artifact wholly sui generis. Through unique arrangements the album provides a thrilling mixture of American cultural approaches. Six of the album’s tracks are covers, all of which are superb renditions. Africa’s cover of The Doors “Light My Fire” is ensconced in the hip hop pantheon for its inclusion as a sample on J Dilla’s Donuts.

Warner Bros sought to capitalize on the popularity of “Billie Joe” by extending the song into a full fledged film in 1976. It was a money maker, but critics widely panned the release.

At the top of Side Two, a raunchy “Louie, Louie” breaks into a stirring rendition of “Ode to Billie Joe”, a song once applauded as the most “earthy and fundamental” art piece to come out of Mississippi since Faulkner by a Miami Herald critic. Just a year prior to Music from “Lil’ Brown”, country singer Bobbie Gentry from Chickasaw County, Mississippi would have a Billboard Number 1 Hit with “Billie Joe”. (It should be noted that legends Barry White and David Axelrod had their fingerprints as A&R men on the path to this ode becoming a smash.) 

The song’s first person narrative dawdles through Southern cordialities when the daughter/narrator learns from her Papa over dinner that a boy she is connected with has committed suicide. “Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge / And now Billie Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge…” Africa’s cover of the song transported the song from white country into a Black jam, while the replacement of female vocals with a male narrator added a taboo layer of homosexual love to the narrative, especially with “Louie, Louie’s” lingering ten-note riff coursing along the song’s riverbed. 

Gatefold of Africa’s Music from “Lil Brown”, recorded in Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles.

Recognizing the tremendous cultural value of the song and its cover, on a dusty day in Los Angeles, June 2021 what struck me was the coincidence of timing—just days ago!—and the imperative of context to the song. “Ode to Billie Joe” is masterful because of the mystery it buries underneath household chores and family dinner, where no detail is spared about the acreage, black eyed peas, or date of the song. I got to wondering… how many songs contain a lyrical timestamp? The gales of November came slashing the Edmund Fitzgerald. Earth, Wind, and Fire remember every 21st day of September, surely. (As brilliantly observed Demi Adejuyigbe’s impressively orchestrated videos from 2016-2021.) Dylan married Isis on the fifth day of May. February 3rd is “The Day the Music Died”. Enola Gay dropped the bomb on August 6th. “Oh, what a night! Late December, back in ‘63. What a lady, what a night…“  

“The ship was the pride of the American side / Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin…”

It’s a Clock, not a Robot 

First conceived and started in Summer 2021, in earnest I fleshed out and compiled most entries in the Calendar of Song under a foot of December snow in Wildwood, NJ, the DooWop Capital of the World. First deployment, dawn of 2022, U2’s “New Years Day”. In its original iteration, my friend and collaborator Parker Higgins composed a bot to wake daily to check the date and data to pluck the cell’s hyperlink and post to Twitter. By October 2022 He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named purchased Twitter and swiftly stole the dancing shoes of such playful bots, putting the Calendar of Song on hiatus until restoration in webpage format. 

While the database is proprietary, the calendar and its contents are public domain and accessible. We share historical and cultural events, just as we share the melodies of popular music. The Calendar of Song herein conceived and presented is a mega blog broken into Robert Christgau length bites, with aspiringly similar acidity and omnivorous appetite. Throughout the year, every year, historical events are remembered and leaders mourned through song: the shocking sinking of the Titanic, the workplace mass murder at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the assassinations of Jesse James, Joe Hill, and MLK. Late 19th and Early 20th Century events feature prominently, indicative of folk songs carrying news along rail lines before radio ley lines took to the airwaves. The Calendar also observes the mundane, nonchalant mentions of dates, months, and days of the week, revealing a shared consciousness of late July contrasted with early February, and Manic Monday versus the Heart of Saturday Night. Thor’s Thursday and Frigga’s Friday have less songs (9) than Saturn’s Saturday (22); Janus’s January (22) spars with Mars’s March (20) in the heavyweight bought among months, while October (10), February (11), and surprisingly September (13) reside in the bottom quartile.  

I made the choice to select nearly zero Christmas songs. That there is well trodden territory. I am a longtime devotee of WXPN 88.5 in Philadelphia, where not only is The Last Waltz 3 LP broadcast every Thanksgiving, but for over 30 years DJ Robert Drake has led “The Night Before Xmas” a 24-30 hour no sleep broadcast that is truly a radio gem. The Calendar of Song directs visitors to WXPN on The Night Before. And I guess, at writing, to Tubi for The Last Waltz. 

Acknowledgement 

The Calendar of Song has been a multi-year effort on not only my part, but supported graciously and generously by my friend, artist-activist and programmer Parker Higgins. Parker and I have had our clocks synchronized since acquiring matching Casio F91-Ws in 2007, and his creative approach to developing code and deploying the Calendar of Song via Twitter bot and now via All Things Atkins dot com has been a sustaining creative force behind bringing this project to life. Parker also serves as webmaster to All Things Atkins, which, despite the straightforwardness of the website, ensures he receives regular offbeat requests which are always taken in understanding stride.