Bust a gut

MP3s of Ice Cream Truck Music: Mr. Softee Tune | Anonymous Ice Cream Truck Song | Ghetto Ice Cream Truck Song (personal favorite)

Summertime weather has hit the eastern seaboard. Sidewalks in NYC are clogged with thousands of stainless steel dirty-water-dog outposts, scads of pasty-legged, flip-flop sportin', post-hibernation sun-seekers, and various ice cream truck jingles reverberate off of windowed high-rises.

Ring in the junk food season:
Burger blog (via BuzzMachine)
Hot Dog blog
Pizza blog
iPoddable NYC pizzeria reviews

Comments

[Mark]

An mp3 of the ghetto version of the ice cream song! AAaaauuuuuggghhhh!!!!!!! "Hello?" Thanks Liz! I have actually been hoping to have an mp3 of this blood-letting, bizarre, skin-ripping-off jingle. I remember in the late 90's, an ice cream truck would stop right outside my window EXACTLY at 6:30 pm EVERY DAY, for a full 30 minutes, right when "The Simpsons" were on TV, which I use to like to watch regularly - and the ice cream truck BLARING this tinny, ear-splitting, excrutiating loop, with the record scratching and whistles and girl saying "Hello?" (I always wondered why they didn't add a male rapper voice saying 'Yo fool... ice cream iz kool!') - would drown out any hope of hearing the audio on the TV no matter how loud I turned it up, or even shut the windows. I always associate that ice cream truck jingle with drowned-out voices of Marge and Homer. At least I can credit Mr. Softie with getting me to watch less TV.

[Gordon]

Thanks for the jingles, and for the hot dog blog, which I hadn't seen.

I'm an ardent Jersey hotdog fan, with prime info sources being HollyEat's amazing hotdog page (http://www.hollyeats.com/HotDogPage.htm), and Roadfood's hotdog forum (http://www.roadfood.com/Forums/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=3)

[Jacob Haller]

USENET god James "Kibo" Parry has been tortured by an ice truck playing jingle #3 every summer for a few years. Here's a post about it: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.religion.kibology/msg/b8fef055b2892192

It turns out that the melody's from a Slim Gaillard song named 'Down By The Station'.

[efd]

in other ice cream truck music news, Mayor Bloomberg may or may not be trying to squelch those jingles. these MP3s might be all we have left at some point.

[fatty]

thanks for the pizza links. There is no decent pizza in Chicago and being a NJ native, I salivate for east coast pizza. Out here, their version of thin crust is essentially putting a bunch of cheese on a Matzah cracker and cutting it into goddamn squares. And then you have the godawful Chicago style pizza...a big pile of starchy shit with some muck stuffed in.

The first time I heard that ghetto ice cream melody...wow...the quaking, the "Hello?". that tinny digitized hello has so much intonation. Some snotty little girl

[david rhoden]

Hey, that's my disappearing hot dog animation! I'm flattered.

[Henry Lowengard]

On my old Brooklyn block, that tune would be accompanied by car alarms
all night long.

I can tell you that the Mr. Softee theme was probably written by Waas-Block Productions of Philadelphia, because a bit of it turned up on an old commercial demo reel of theirs that I used to have. This page specifically cites Les Waas as the producer and perhaps composer.
http://broadcastpioneers.50g.com/waas.html

The creamiest, dreamiest soft ice cream
You get from Mister Softee.
For a refreshing delight supreme
Look for Mister Softee.
My milkshakes and my sundaes and my cones are such a treat.
Listen for my store on wheels—ding-a-ling down the street.
[first four lines repeat]
S-O-F-T double E
Mister Softee!

You may prefer the lyrics used by the lamented DRINK ME's Wynn Evans:

Song of the Ice Cream Truck Wynne Evans

Under the silvery summer moon
The fingerlings are spawning
Spreading their banners of cloudy roe
Along the sandy shore
High in the orchards the apricots
Grow weary of their corsets
Wantonly tumble In dishabille
In piles across the floor
Cynthia, Cynthia, can't you hear? The giddy bells are chiming
Over and over the glockenspiel
Pours out its endless tune
Here in the shadows behind your house
The summer grass is growing
Throw off your care and your cotton dress
Beneath the summer moon

That's what I call alternate lyrics!

[panny]

ok i had no idea that ghetto ice cream jingle was universal. LOL i hear that all around my neighborhood, as do my friends where they live. we all get a kick out of the huge "HELLO!" at the end of the loop.

too funny.

[prohaskas]

your middle ice cream song is "And The Band Played On" older than dirt from the 1890s

[Trevor]

It's funny how music works - if you grew up in Australia, the only tune used by ice-cream trucks right across the country, regardless of vendor, was "Greensleeves" (why Greensleeves? who knows?). Consequently, none of these tunes "sounds" like ice-cream truck music to me, if you know what I mean.

[Oscar]

Greensleeves is a staple of my childhood too, here in South London. One of the seven ice cream vans in my area has Greensleeves as its jingle and has done for at least 14 years, since my family moved here.

The other six are:

Theme from Doctor Zhivago
"Girls And Boys Come Out To Play"
O Sole Mio (AKA Just One Cornetto. Famous TV ad in the UK in the 1980s.)
Two tunes I'm very familiar with having heard them incessantly every summer but which I can't identify
and the latest, which I just started hearing this year: Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.

Argh.

[Sarah]

Did you get that Ghetto Ice Cream Truck song from Jamaica Plain in Boston? That truck used to scare the crap out of me!

[marcus]

Hemglass, of Sweden.
http://archive.killingar.net/sounds/HEMGLASS.mp3
Company slogan: "Awful music - Good ice cream".

(I would suggest "Tormenting Swedes since 1968")

[vanjulio]

The ghetto ice cream song made my father and I fall to the ground laughing every time we heard that freaking thing go through my folks' neighborhood. I am completely shattered now that I can listen to this insanity at any time now! Thank you very very much for this pleasure!

[Pete]

But nothing from Brooklyn's Kool Man ice cream trucks? The ones which, every time I'm there, firmly cement Frank Mills's "Music Box Dancer" in my head for oh, about 36 hours?

[Kristy & Shawn Moyer]

We have got to thank you for posting the "Ghetto Ice Cream Truck" MP3 on the site. Shawn had told me NUMEROUS times about working construction jobs in the projects and hearing this "goofy ice cream truck song" with honking horns and a lady yelling "HELLO!" and I never believed him. On a whim, we typed "Ghetto Ice Cream Truck" into a search engine and linked to this site. We have sat here listening to the MP3 and laughing our asses off. I finally have heard it - AND I DIDN'T HAVE TO GO TO THE PROJECTS! Thanks so much for making our day!
Kristy & Shawn Moyer
Pittsburgh, PA

[Ray Hough]

Hi making a film for BBC TV about ice cream vans in London anyone in London interested in talking contact me thanks

Ray

[Tom White]

Thank you for posting the Hello.mp3. I will be running this loop continously on my outdoor system to control the Pavlovian response of my three children when the local Ice Cream man is in the neighborhood.

We have 20+ kids in our "listening area", which makes us a great target for the evening pass of our ICM.

I think I'll program this to run 3-4 times with my existing outdoor tunes just to throw the kids systems off when the ICM doesn't show I'll let them know it my system and hopefully when the real ICM drives through they won't be wooed like the snakes to St. Peter.

[KernelKlink]

Does anyone know what that "HELLO" ice cream truck song is, like the actual name? What do they use in trucks to produce the music?

[Nicolas Trumen]

Just letting you know - your site is fantastic! No proof of ideas: http://anthony.ianniciello.net/blog/archives/000079.html , Soft voice over the net

[Bangbus]

We have got to thank you for posting the "Ghetto Ice Cream Truck" MP3 on the site. Shawn had told me NUMEROUS times about working construction jobs in the projects and hearing this "goofy ice cream truck song" with honking horns and a lady yelling "HELLO!" and I never believed him. On a whim, we typed "Ghetto Ice Cream Truck" into a search engine and linked to this site. We have sat here listening to the MP3 and laughing our asses off. I finally have heard it - AND I DIDN'T HAVE TO GO TO THE PROJECTS! Thanks so much for making our day!
Kristy & Shawn Moyer
Pittsburgh, PA

[Eric]

The "hello" one has been making the rounds around the suburbs in St. Louis for the last few years, and has been weirding out my friend's dog.

>Out here, their version of thin crust is essentially putting a bunch of cheese on a Matzah cracker and cutting it into goddamn squares.

That'd also be St. Louis-style pizza, thank you very much. Yeah... I tend only to eat NY or Napoli-style. STL-style is fine as a snack food (alcohol helps), as long as you stay well away from that god-awful provel.

[SamJuan]

the ghetto ice cream song is definitely not Slim Gaillard, the melody is different. It's a song that every Japanese school child knows. Who wrote it or where it came from I don't know, but it's called Makiba No Uta-Animal Song or Okaokoe Ikouyo-Let's walk up the hill-picnic song

[hayes1]

google

[JamesMontagna]

Are you sure those Japanese song names are correct? I can't even find any other page that so much as mentions their existence... Weird.