Nobody taught you this one. It just… happened.
Go ahead, say it. You just sang it in your head, didn’t you. Forty-whatever years old and the alphabet still comes with a melody attached, free of charge, no subscription required, no memory of ever agreeing to this.
Some songs don’t even bother finishing the sentence.
That second one, by the way — I looked up the actual lyrics recently. Turns out none of us had any idea what we were singing. “You look a little naughty but you’re so polite”? We were nine. We just liked the “jam up jelly tight” part and hollered it accordingly. The song didn’t care whether we understood it. It just wanted to be sung, and we obliged, jelly-wise ignorance and all.
Then there are the ones that aren’t yours — they’re everybody’s, the second somebody starts them.
One person starts it and the whole room is in, off-key, mid-bite of whatever they were eating, no rehearsal, no warning. Whole stadiums did it during the World Cup this summer — the Scots got a reputation for it — grown adults, thousands of miles from West Virginia, absolutely committed to a song about a place none of them had ever been. Nobody asked them to. It just happens. Somebody opens their mouth and the rest of the room can’t help it.
Some songs play hide and seek instead. Won’t come when you call, but let a particular smell drift by, or a word land just right, and suddenly you’re eleven again for exactly as long as the song lasts. Rude, in a way. Very effective.
And every so often there’s one that means more than it lets on — mine’s an Amy Grant song about a father’s eyes, and I’m not going to unpack why here except to say it showed up at exactly the right time, wearing two faces at once, and that’s a story for another day.
There’s one more song everybody knows the tune to without ever choosing it, the same way we all somehow know the alphabet:
Every church, every century, same four words. Turns out the stadium didn’t invent that trick. We just borrowed it.
So — what’s yours? The one you’ll start singing before you even realize your mouth is moving?
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