huckleberry huckleberry huckleberry huckleberry

Cafe Society
1

If you read this subject line and didn’t think “what the heck is this?” but “wow, it must be about <X>”, boy do I want to hear from you.

This is another one of those “help me, I’ve got a song stuck in my head” questions, except I’m not even sure it’s a song. If I hadn’t had a car full of other earwitnesses, I would be willing to bet it had all been a dream.

Here’s the story: last year, I did a cross-country drive with my family - NYC to SF - via the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park (among many other stops). My kids had never been as far west as the area around Allentown, PA. I’d always planned an “out west road trip” with them, and this was going to be it.

One of my memories of driving around in the Mountain Time Zone with my parents on a long-ago trip to the Grand Canyon / Zion National Park / Yellowstone was listening to the radio and hearing pretty much nothing but country music, country gospel music, and religious programming. Not wishing to completely deprive my kids of this experience, despite my purchasing an XM Radio subscription before heading out on this trip (my car came with a factory radio that was XM enabled), as we drove west across the Mississippi - crossing at La Crosse, WI - I set the station to “Willie’s Roadhouse”, a country music station I found acceptably fun. Occasionally I rotated the channel one up or down, which were also flavors of country music (XM likes to cluster content). So I’m not 100% sure it was Willie’s Roadhouse I was listening to, when…

Well, XM radio channels don’t have commercials, except for their own programming. Yet somewhere in Montana, they mentioned the name of an artist (possibly of a song that had just been played) performing on such-and-such a date, maybe with a live simulcast on XM radio, and at the point where one might expect a short clip of one of his most recognizable songs, we heard the spoken words (not sung, and with no musical accompaniment):

huckleberry, huckleberry;
huckleberry, huckleberry

And then the voiceover resumed. We all burst out laughing so I didn’t get to hear the rest of the information.

And we never heard this again on our entire trip.

I still wonder if I really heard it. But my wife and three kids all agree, and still occasionally burst out with “huckleberry, huckleberry” and laugh.

So please. Help me. Help us all. Tell me what this was all about!

2

The best I could come up with is this by some band called Blackstone Valley Crew out of the New England area. It’s not country music, though, so I’m not holding high hopes that it’s the one. (Although it does fit the “not sung” part well.)

3

Cool, local band. Never heard of them before, seems like they are no longer together.

4

Probably of no real value, but I thought of:

  1. Huckleberry Hound
  2. Huckleberry Finn
  3. one of the Doc Holliday characters in either Wyatt Earp or Tombstone from that year both were first run movies – probably from Tombstone (1993) - Quotes - IMDb –
5

The only other thing I associate the repetition of “huckleberry” with is music class in grammar school. Whole notes were vocalized as “pie.” Eighth notes as “apple.” Eighth note triplets were “blueberry.” Sixteenth notes were “huckleberry.”

6

So maybe it was some kind of vocal warm-up, is what you’re saying? Could be.

And no, what we heard wasn’t the BVC rap version of “huckleberry”, but not all that dissimilar except for the background track… :slight_smile:

7

I don’t really think so, but when I saw the thread title, that’s immediately what I thought of. Of course, now I got that BVC “I’m you’re huckleberry, huckleberry, huckleberry. Huckleberry.” stuck in my head for the rest of the night. Never heard of them, don’t think they ever made it big, but damn it’s stuck from one listen.

8

When I saw your title I thought of Toby Keith’s song Huckleberry. He doesn’t repeat the words over and over like that, but maybe he did at the concert?

9

Hmmm. Could be. “Toby Keith” is a name I don’t recognize, yet it sounds familiar, so maybe I recall it from that ad (or it could just be that “two first names” bit). Thanks for the lead and a nice enough song if nothing else!