What makes 10-pound baby boys so bloody special?
Yeah, and who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?
Because when all you have is a dollar in your pocket and a head full of dreams, a 10 pound baby is going to put you down, push you around and change your point of view.
Stewart wrote the lyrics with the music by three men. Fact: many men want at least one boy and they want the first child to be a masculine child (paging Luca Brasi). Plus from what I remember what his girlfriend of the 1970s Britt Ekland said, Stewart is not the most admirable man in the world.
You can guess about why but Stewart expresses a common wish among men for centuries and different cultures (look at the gender imbalance of China's one-policy child).Nothing. Everyone knows that a 7 lb 3 oz girl with daddy’s nose is the child of a man’s dreams. It’s just a lot harder to scan.
“Boy” is also easier to end a sung line with than “girl.”
Also, “girl” doesn’t rhyme. Oh wait – “boy” doesn’t rhyme, either. WTF???
bernie2016
I see what you did there. 
It doesn’t rhythm but ‘baby boy’ is alliterative.
A counterexample - “American Child” by Phil Vassar:
“Seven pounds three ounces, she’s got my nose
And she’s into my heart, as deep as it goes
With a promise that’s more than just someone’s last name
Anyone’s equal, in late August came
An American child…”
I suspect that the men writing the song also lacked a visceral appreciation for just how big a ten-pound baby is.
Sure. But it’s 10 pounds! It’s a tenpin bowling ball!
(“Bowling ball” alliterates like “Baby boy”. The song would almost work as well.)
Having had a 4545 gram baby boy, well if I wrote songs and could sing about it I would. Especially when my incision tore up after and I walked around for 4 months with a slowly closing hole in my lower abdomen.
What I wouldn’t do is have the father put it almost as a post script in a letter home to my parents. As clueless as he may have been about many things, even he knew it was all about phone calls. (Texts were around, but only just and I don’t think any of the grandparents had mobile phones at the time)
A womb with a view! I did say “visceral” advisedly…
It could be worse. One of my aunts had a kid who was nearly 12 pounds, and another aunt had triplets, the lightest of whom was 6 pounds 1. My family, as you might guess, tends towards big babies.
When a family friend had a baby at 6 pounds even, I asked “Oh no, what’s wrong with her?”.
I just love the songwriter’s idea of young people with free hearts. Let’s see how free your heart is after changing your 7th poopy diaper of the day in your shitty two room apartment.
Shotgun wedding. She delayed giving birth as long as she could to stretch it out to 9 months after the wedding night, and the kid got up to 10 pounds.
Still a more cheerful song than Bruce Springsteen’s adolescent downer “The River”, and an interesting counterpoint.
That is nobody’s business but the Young Turks.