A few months ago, I asked about an earworm and got some much appreciated help from a few Dopers. Here’s another one. I used to hear it on TV in the Chicagoland area in the late 1970s, maybe into the early 1980s. It’s some kind of theme music at the end of a show, a program or even some kind of public-service announcement (but not a commercial), and it ends with a choir that sounds very much like black gospel. I’ve checked YouTube for the sitcoms of the era where it might have shown up (The Jeffersons, Good Times, Sanford and Son, etc.) and other unlikely things like The Electric Company, The Children’s Television Workshop… even those Fat Albert cartoons… No match, so far.
I think I can describe it accurately enough, though, so here goes:
As I said above, clearly influenced by black gospel. A choir sings a single vowel (“oo” as in “too”) over a descending blues scale, resolving to major at the end, at which point they sing “Right on!” The melody alternates a quarter note and two eighth notes (one, two-and, three, four-and, etc.) over eight beats. I don’t know how to make the notes line up correctly with the “words” here, so in both I’ll just use commas to separate the quarter notes and hyphens to separate the eighth notes. In the key of E (blues), it might look something like this:
oo, oo-oo, oo, oo-oo, oo, oo-oo, oo, right on!
E, D-B, D, B-A, B, A-G, A, A-G#
Does anyone remember something like that?