Backdated, archival post
[link to original on tumblr]
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I just listened to the Beach Boys' All Summer Long (the 1990s re-issue packaged together with Little Deuce Coupe and some bonus tracks). I transcribed some of the songs (because my transcriptions of Beach Boys songs are frightfully scarce), and I noticed a couple things about the lyrics in "Hushabye," written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman.
The last two lines in the first verse are: "Guardian angels up above / Take care of the one I love." I'd always understood the "Guardian angels up above" line as a vocative because there's a vocative in the preceding line: "Oh, my darlin', don't you cry." The line break seems to further that reading too. Consequently, the next line - "Take care of the one I love" - is an imperative.
Listening to and transcribing the song now, I realized that it could just be a statement interrupted by a line break. Instead of "Guardian angels up above, take care of the one I love," it's just "Guardian angels up above take care of the one I love." Rather than the singer/speaker commanding the angels to guard his loved one, he's reassuring his love that she's being watched over.
I'm most familiar with "Hushabye" via the Beach Boys' version, and I'm fairly familiar with Jay & the Americans' version, but the liner notes for the Little Deuce Coupe/All Summer Long re-issue mention that the original was by the Mystics. I happened to have the notation for the Mystics' version (from 1959) in Hal Leonard's Essential Songs: The 1950s. In those lyrics, there's a comma between "Guardian angels up above" and "Take care of the one I love," indicating that those lines are a vocative and an imperative:
Both readings are grammatically viable though.
(For what it's worth, while the notation here is in F major [and I'm assuming the Mystics' version is in F major too, since the notation is based on their version], the Beach Boys' version is in E major, and Jay & the Americans' is in G major.)
I've been focusing on my Collection Audit project instead of this one (and others), but I noticed something about "Hushabye" from All Summer Long, so this sort of overlaps here.The second thing I noticed is the phrase "dawn's early light" in the bridge: "Lullaby and goodnight / Till the dawn's early light." I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but that same phrase is in the first line of "The Star Spangled Banner" - "Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light / What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?"
