Roger Miller - King of the Road

youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhApYxZisBI]

I have an odd recurring day dream where for some reason I'm the only musician left on Earth and the only songs that get passed on are the ones I have learned. As a result, I can play and sing hundreds of songs from memory.

My current quest, as you know if you follow this blog, is to acquire perfect "absolute" pitch.

As part of that, right now I'm working on internalizing one octave of a piano keyboard. My goal is to be able to "play" a paper version of a piano keyboard from Middle C down one octave and sing the correct notes.

To help learn the intervals, I've also been using certain songs. Besides being one of the best songs ever written, King of the Road is interesting because it contains every note, the entire major scale, in one octave. So does the "Do Re Me Fa So La Ti Do" song, but King of the Road is much more fun to sing.

The version above (and the Dean Martin version and the combo Roger Miller Dean Martin version ) his first vocal note is A#/Bb, but if you transpose it up to C and sing it in that key, you'd sing every white key on a piano keyboard from Middle C down an octave. I'm still looking for a version in C. Here is one that starts in G#/Ab.

The closest to C I've found is this: FretKiller from Long Island, New York has a version that starts in B, up a 1/2 step from the Roger Miller version:

Hmm. Not sure what the problem is. This video plays fine on youtube, but when embedded, it says the video is no longer available.

P.S. In my version I sing the corrected "Bang-Gor" Maine, not "Bang-er" Maine the way it was written because Bang-Gor is the way the people of the city of Bangor pronounce it.