Once upon a time, the jingle composer was a genuine pop composer, with memorable tunes and lyrics like leitmotifs worming themselves into our consciousness – or, their employers hope, subconsciousness – with the aim of triggering or offering the illusion of fulfillment to our cravings. Ultimately, I don’t know how much Coca-Cola or how many Big Macs they sold, or how much they directed us to Alka-Seltzer as a palliative, but for those of us of a certain age, they did provide a kind of crazy-quilt soundtrack to the living rooms and automobile radios of our childhoods.
There comes a time when one assumes that most of those jingles in the 1970s were written by Barry Manilow. Then one learns otherwise. Ginny Redington died on December 31 at the age of 77. Her obituary ran yesterday in The New York Times.
Redington is new to me, but of course I recognize her work. We all did. She wrote music and lyrics for McDonald’s (“You, You’re the One”) and Coke (“Coke is It”), among others. And yes, she was married Thomas W. Dawes, the Alka-Seltzer guy. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfAac4cslMc
Additional video and sound files here:
https://sundazedmusic.bandcamp.com/album/open-wide-america-the-ginny-redington-jingle-workshop
Redington with the tools of her trade: a pen, some cassettes, a stopwatch, a guitar, and positivity to burn