What is the earliest childhood memory you have of a specific piece of music? I can remember walking down the street (in my hometown, in Germany) with a few of my fussball buddies — all of us whistling the Colonel Bogey March, which would have been because the 1957 Bridge on the River Kwai film-version of that tune was, memetically speaking, particularly fecund. (I doubt any of us had actually seen the movie, so the mode of infection would have been indirect.) Anyways, I would have been about seven years old.

There was another tune from that childhood era and I couldn’t, for the longest time, figure out what it was. I remember there being a simple record player in my home (probably borrowed — we couldn’t afford such things) and a small number of 45s that went with it. I played this particular instrumental single over and over, because I enjoyed its exotic strains. The memory of that tune degraded over the years to the point where i recalled more about the nature of the tune than the actual melody: It had something to do with the Middle East or India, I thought.

I’ve been collecting music since the invention of the CD-format. (I had a few albums from the sixties/early-seventies but it was not a serious obsession.) Finally, a couple of years ago, I ran into my melody in the form of a Kai Warner Orchestra cover: It was instant recognition. And with the music came a name: You can’t do any research without a name!

The tune was initially called Harem Dance, done by a group called the Armenian Jazz Sextet. It hit the American charts in April of 1957. As was common in those days, a cover version, by a Ralph Marterie Orchestra (who called it Shish-Kebab), was released about the same time. It fared somewhat better in the charts (reaching #10 in May/June) and I know (from a Belgian hit-parade compilation) it also reached (three months later) European ears. This then is to what I must have listened.

Now, if I could only find out who did the talking-blues number, last heard circa 1970, with the refrain: “Y’all don’t even know that my name is Mo’.”