Maps and cartography are not particularly popular as song themes.
But there is the Longitude and Latitude Song (MP3 file here). Careful or you’ll be singing this one out loud in your cubicle.
Performed by Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans, and written by Hy Zaret, the song is one of a series of sciency tunes, aimed to inspire Sputnik-era kiddies, on the Space Songs album, recorded in 1959.
Jeff Poskanzer’s terrific Singing Science web page has all the tracks from Space Songs, as well as the tracks from subsequent albums Energy and Motion Songs (“Ultraviolet and Infrared”), Experiment Songs (“We Know the Air is There”), Weather Songs (“The Water Cycle Song”), Nature Songs (“Song of the Rocks”), and More Nature Songs (“What is an Animal”).
Absent from the albums are other potential map songs: “Which Datum Do You Use?” “Project Me,” “The Large Scale/Small Scale Polka,” “Your Love is like a Decorative Font,” “She’s Natural Breaks, I’m Quantiles,” and “The Symbols of my Love are Abstract Shapes in a Selection of Different Hues Corresponding to Qualitative Data Variation.” I’ll stop now.
A quick search of a few open-source music databases (FreeDB and MusicBrainz) results in hundreds of songs with map in the title. Not many latitude/longitude songs, though. There are also quite a few mappy band names: The Maps, Swell Maps, Maps and Diagrams, Maps of the Heart (blah!), Maps and Atlases, Relief Maps, The Plat Maps, Map, Map of Wyoming, Map of the World, Town Map, The Map, Map of Africa, Map of Hell, Penguin Map Mijinko, The Search Map, Book of Maps, Minus a Map, Map the Growth, Map of July, Days without Maps, Mind Maps, Maps of Norway, and Not on the Map.
The potentially evil, formerly-open-source music database Gracenote has a moderately interesting Music Maps page, which uses recent CD lookup data to map the geography of popular music.
And, of course, the excellent World Beat Music map of the world over at Strange Maps.
Latitude/longitude graphic from David Greenhood’s classic book Mapping.
Well, as long as you’re on the topic, I’ve been playing the song “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs with my kids on Rock Band a lot recently :)
Don’t forget to mention the song you quoted in your book, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W” by Wire…
The Latitude and Longitude song is so cool. Thanks for sharing.
[…] on the heels of my post on the toe-tapping Longitude and Latitude song, a bit of background information on my other favorite coordinate-oriented song, Map Ref. 41° […]
It’s always fantastic to hear there’s Wire fans in the mix.
[…] Found here! […]
more space songs here: http://www.myspace.com/thespacesongs
does anyone know where i can get the lyrics for this song?