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"If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree."

Early peaches, this morning:

Peaches on a peach tree naturally makes me think of song lyrics, and I found this on Wikipedia:

The ?peaches? verse ["If you don't like my peaches/Don't you shake my tree/'n Get out of my orchard/Let my peaches be," in "Sitting on Top of the World"] has a long history in popular music. It appears as the chorus of an unpublished song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: ?If you don't want my peaches / You'd better stop shaking my tree.? The song "Mamma's Got the Blues", written by Clarence Williams and S. Martin and recorded by Bessie Smith in 1923, has the line: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be". In her version of "St. Louis Blues", Ella Fitzgerald sang, "If you don't like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? / Stay out of my orchard, and let my peach tree be". In 1929 Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded ?Peach Orchard Mama? ("... you swore nobody?d pick your fruit but me / I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). In later years lines using similar imagery were used in ?Matchbox? by Carl Perkins and ?The Joker? by the Steve Miller Band. Ahmet Ertegun was able to convince Miller to pay him US$50,000, claiming authorship of the line in his song "Lovey Dovey". This verse and its ubiquitous usage is an example of the tradition of ?floating lyrics? (also called 'maverick stanzas') in folk-music tradition.

In "The Joker," it's "You're the cutest thing that I ever did see/I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree." Video.

"Matchbox" is the most familiar one to me, and it's the version I've put in the post title: "If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree." (Here's Carl Perkins, performing the song I learned from The Beatles.) Though the history of the "floating lyric" suggests the opposite, Carl is talking about the masculine anatomy.

Full post as published by Althouse on May 13, 2009 (boomark / email).