“Here we walk in the verdant groves…” — all afternoon I’d been humming a Shaker song, attributed to the Shaker community in Enfield, New Hampshire; I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. Suddenly I realized why the tune seemed so familiar: the first phrase was exactly the same as the first phrase of the theme song to the old television show “Gilligan’s Island”: “Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…” Even though the Shakers sang it first, that spoiled the song and made me want to stop singing it. But I couldn’t, and now hours later the tune is still running round and round in my head — “Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…, Here we walk in the verdant groves…” — and I just can’t get rid of it. Maybe if I write about it, I can get it out of my head and make you start humming it instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Here we walk in the verdant groves…” — all afternoon I’d been humming a Shaker song, attributed to the Shaker community in Enfield, New Hampshire; I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. Suddenly I realized why the tune seemed so familiar: the first phrase was exactly the same as the first phrase of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7793"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7797,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7793\/revisions\/7797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}