Re "If I knew you were comin', I'd have baked a cake"

(a) which might deserve a separate thread of its own in this forum, crossposted with this one =

(b) if I mistake not, Edmund White _A Boy's Own Story_ remembers it as "If I'd a-known you were comin'" (which is indeed grammatical, in that I'd-a = "I had"), cites Rosemary Clooney, and uses it as a "period marker" for the time...

(c) the small additions to various versions equate to the equivalent of folk mutation (here "elaboration")

(d) apart from the male parody of female speaker form by Crosby/Hope, which rescues masculinity by adding a seven course meal of horse, and one speaker calling the other a "moose", a commemt on one of the youtube postings correctly notes that this song [like "Swinging' on a Star" which got much parody in a film "Christmas special", including "L'Amour is an actress who gets reimbursed"] was made for parody (and has, according to taste, a clever/obscene one with a reference to oral sex and hacking for the "howchadu = how-d'you-do" in one of the other postings in that youtube thread)...

(e) the appropriation for advertising is interesting, and such a feature of popular songs as they grow older and enter "the [urban folk?] consciousness"...

(d) I used to listen to the 78rpm which we had in India (Clooney?) as a child, and *cry* - an aesthetic reaction, I think - because of what obviously struck the infant as its "searing sweetness", what it took to be the eagerness to please of the wifely/motherly/hospitable speaker, and what I think must have been the emotional effect of the minor key...

Comments?

Sanjay Sircar