“Oh, sure,” Berliner said. “That’s a popular one. But I have no idea what it is.”
Loops that lure them in
Recognize this tune that Mohamed Jalloh played from his truck for years? It is instantly familiar as "ice cream truck music," though Jalloh, who has been an ice cream vendor for 25 years, has no idea what the song is. But he knows it is his signature sound in the neighborhood.
The Ice Cream Truck Song:
"If you had to listen to the same 40-second clip of a song on repeat for hours on end, which song would you choose? Why?"
The Post
The earliest ice cream trucks issued their calls to the curb with jingling chimes, such as the set hanging from a vintage Good Humor truck being restored in Berliner’s workshop for the National Museum of American History.
The first melodic version appeared in 1929, when a California vendor bolted an amplified music box to the roof of his truck and brought the kiddies running with a Polish folk song called “The Farm Pump,” according to ethnomusicologist Daniel Neely.
It worked. Today, very few sounds command such instant recognition, Neely said, even when listeners don’t know the tune.
“I compare ice cream music to church bells,” he said. “Both are beacons. The sounds are really simple, but you know instantly what they are.”
But Neely, who wrote a chapter on ice cream truck music for an Oxford University book on sound studies, couldn’t peg Jalloh’s song.
“Of course, I’ve heard it, but I don’t know what it is,” Neely said after listening to a recording of the theme.
Today, the most popular ice cream truck song in the country is a half-minute loop of “The Entertainer,” according to Mark Nichols of Nichols Electronics, the Minnesota company that makes most of the nation’s ice cream truck sound systems. His father started the firm in 1957 after inventing a transistorized replacement for the clockwork-style machine that used to be the norm.
“The technology has changed, but the songs have hardly changed at all in a century,” Nichols said. “They’re all old, all simple and all in the public domain. We go out of our way to avoid violating anybody’s copyright.”
Also echoing around American cul-de-sacs each summer, he said, are “Turkey in the Straw,” “Sailing, Sailing,” “Little Brown Jug” and “Camptown Races.”
The music box man knows
Not much has broken into the repertoire since Nichols, chasing demographic trends, sent for the sheet music of “La Cucaracha” about 10 years ago.
“Every now and then, somebody will want to try some rap music,” he said. “The problem is that customers think it’s just somebody playing their radio too loud. When you hear one of these vending classics, they know exactly what it is.”
But none of those standards is the tune that Jalloh blasts every day. Nichols agreed to listen to the recording.
It took him three notes.
“That’s ‘The Picnic,’ ” he said.
The song is no song at all. Rather, it is a medley of tunes. An Asian manufacturer placed it on a computer chip to show off a new technology. It was just supposed to be a sample, but Nichols included it in the Omni music box. It became an ice cream standard.
Nichols has been able to identify a riff on “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” in the latter measures but little else. A decade of nostalgia rests on a mystery programmer in Taiwan.
“I haven’t been able to trace it any more than that,” Nichols said. “But it sure got a lot of play.”
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