Newer Than They Think / Music

• "The Star-Spangled Banner" did not officially become the US National Anthem until 1931. It might not have become the national anthem at all but for a letter-writing campaign launched by Robert Ripley, of Ripley's Believe It or Not! fame. (However, it was being sung at baseball games as early as 1918, and it was used as a Standard Snippet even before then.) The unofficial national anthem prior to that point was what is now the vice president's song, "Hail, Columbia". The piece of music to which "The Star-Spangled Banner" is set is Older Than They Think, however, being the tune to an 18th-century English drinking song (already comparatively obscure by the time Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics in 1814) called "To Anachreon in Heaven".
• Although there are a very few Christmas carols still sung today that come from the (later) Middle Ages, the overwhelming majority of most people's repertoires is modern. Even the genuinely old carols are invariably old melodies coupled with relatively modern lyrics, which make them sound much older than they really are. The list of "traditional Christmas carols that are actually younger than A Christmas Carol" includes "O Holy Night" (1847, with English lyrics written in 1855), "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" (1849), "Good King Wenceslas" (1853, though written to a 13th-century melody), "We Three Kings" (1857), "Masters in this Hall" (1860), "What Child Is This?" (1865, though the tune "Greensleeves" dates to the 16th century), "O Little Town of Bethlehem" (1868), "In the Bleak Midwinter" (lyrics written in 1872), and "Away in a Manger" (1882).
  • 20th-century Christmas tunes that might be assumed to be older than they are include "Ding Dong Merrily on High" (1924, though written to a 16th-century melody), "I Wonder as I Wander" (1933), "White Christmas" (1940), "The Little Drummer Boy" (1941, popularized in 1957), "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)" (1944, with a melody by Mel Tormé), "Ring, Christmas Bells" (1947, based on the Ukrainian "Carol of the Bells", which itself only dates from 1916), "Caroling, Caroling" (1954), "Mary's Boy Child" (1956), and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" (1962).
  • "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was created in 1939 as part of a marketing campaign for Montgomery Ward and was first recorded in song ten years later by Gene Autry.
  • This XKCD provides the timeline of many "traditional" Christmas songs.
  • "The Twelve Days of Christmas" has a medieval feel – what with the lords a-leaping and pipers piping and so on – but the earliest-known publication of the lyrics was in 1780 (so, four years after the Declaration of Independence), the familiar melody was only added to the song in 1909, and it really didn't gain widespread popularity until The '40s.
  • And then there's "Over the River and Through the Woods" and "Jingle Bells", both of which were originally about Thanksgiving, not Christmas. Respectively written as an 1844 poem and a 1857 song, they only became associated with Christmas after the mid-19th century, when the Little Ice Age finally ended and sleigh-ride-worthy snow in November became a rarity even in New England.^note  A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving got it right, using "Over the River and Through the Woods" in a Thanksgiving context.
  • "Deck the Halls" was also originally not about Christmas—it began as the carol "Nos Galan", which means "New Year's Eve" in Welsh. Most people regard it as archaic, and the music can be dated to the 1500s, but the lyrics (both English and Welsh) were custom-written in 1862 for a collection of Welsh ballads and were very consciously retro. Not only that, but the familiar English lyrics were fixed in 1877 by an American magazine for teachers, in which they Bowdlerized several references to drinking (in a Hilarious in Hindsight moment, the notorious "Don we now our gay apparel" was the more child-friendly substitute for "Fill the meadcup, drain the barrel").
• Also, secular Western music itself. Most music passed off as "medieval" is much younger. Some of the oldest tunes we know about can't be dated earlier than the 12th or 13th centuries; even Child Ballads usually can't be definitively traced back before the 16th or 17th centuries.
  • The verse/chorus structure of modern musical lyrics is also a relative latecomer; it developed in Moorish Spain.
  • The major/minor key structure is no older than the late 17th century – and orchestras in their modern form — certainly of more than about six musicians playing at once – were barely viable before that (because of the difficulty of pitching all the instruments to one another in the earlier modal scale).
• There are several reggae songs recorded between the mid-1980s and the 1990s that were misattributed to Bob Marley throughout YouTube, when he died in 1981.
• Numerous folk songs are younger than you might think:
  • The popular Irish Crowd Song about the Famine, "The Fields of Athenry", seems ancient, but was only written in the 1970s by Pete St. John.
  • Another beloved Irish folk standard, "Danny Boy", was only written in 1910 (and by an English songwriter!) and set to its present tune a few years later. (The tune, the "Londonderry Air", is older – it was first collected by a musicologist in 1855.) And it didn't take off as a standard until the 1940s, when Judy Garland, Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller all recorded hit versions within a year of each other.
  • Related: The traditional highland lament "Ashokan Farewell", featured heavily on the soundtrack of Ken Burns' documentary on the American Civil War, is often assumed to be an authentic period tune. Jay Ungar wrote it all the way back in 1982, in the highlands of New York. In fact, it's the only contemporary tune on the soundtrack, and had nothing to do with the Civil War when he wrote it – it was a "farewell" after that year's Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camps ended.
  • "The Skye Boat Song" was written in 1884, 138 years after the events it commemorates and long after Jacobitism had ceased to have any status as an active movement.
  • Similarly, "The Scotsman" only dates to 1976, when North Carolina-based singer-songwriter Mike Cross first wrote and recorded it, although the joke it's based off is older.
  • "The Witch of the West-Mer-Lands" dates to 1968.
  • "Galway Girl" was written by Steve Earle (who's an American no less) in 2000.
• Everyone who hears Herman's Hermits' "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter" assumes it to be a cover of an old British music hall tune. In fact, it was written in 1963, a mere two years before the Hermits recorded it. ("I'm Henry the VIII, I Am", on the other hand, was a cover of an old British music hall tune.)
• The lyrics to "Havah Nagilah" were written in 1918. The melody is older, but only by about a century or so (and it originated in Ukraine, not the Middle East).
• The Hanukkah standard "I Have a Little Dreidel" ("dreidel, dreidel, dreidel") was written in 1927 in New York. It only became famous in The '50s, after its composer Samuel Goldfarb became the music director of a Seattle synagogue and taught it to the congregation's children.
• Similarly, "Katyusha", widely regarded as the quintessential Russian folk song, was written in 1938. Then, a rocket artillery truck got named after the song in WW2.
• The song "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music was written, in English, for that musical. It was later translated into German, and seems so natural in that language, many people have claimed to have heard it before the musical was written, and complimented Rodgers and Hammerstein on the faithfulness of their "adaptation". In fact, according to The Other Wiki, some folks even assume it to be the national anthem of Austria! In style it's close enough to Austria's actual anthem ("Land der Berge, Land am Strome") that it's a forgivable misconception. Furthermore, the "Edelweiss" popular at the time the movie was set in was a Nazi marching song.
• The beatmania IIDX songs "A," "AA," and "Kid A", despite sounding classical, were composed specifically for IIDX. "Piano Concerto No. 1 'Anti-Ares'," also from IIDX, takes this trope further, with a full eight-minute version that can be found on the IIDX RED soundtrack, and a biography about its fictitious composer, Virkato Wakhmaninov, who allegedly lived from 1893 to 1974. The last paragraph of his biography mentions that Virkato performed the song on a "great keyboard and disc" (did this setup really exist in the early 20th century?) and that he spoke about an "arrangement for a keyboard of seven keys." Virkato is an alias of Jun Wakita, one of Konami's in-house composers, and he composed this song in 2004.
  • The pseudonym should have been a hint of the song's true age; it's a pun on the name of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.
    • And "Piano Concerto No. 1 'Anti-Ares'" is itself a pastiche of Rachmaninov's piano concertos.
• The famous Adagio in G minor by Tommaso Albinoni (1674–1745) is an original composition by 20th-century "arranger" Remo Giazotto, who published the piece in 1958.
• The "Ave Maria" attributed to Baroque Italian composer Guilio Caccini (1551–1618) was written by Russian lutenist Vladimir Vavilov in 1972. This is not the same "Ave Maria" as the one you're thinking of right now, which is either the one arranged by Charles Gounod in 1853 (using a 17th-century melody by Bach), or the one written by Schubert in 1825 (which was used in Fantasia). What's more, neither of THOSE was written as "Ave Maria", either. Gounod's was originally an instrumental ("Medidtation"), and Schubert's was a song called "Ellens Gesang III" (which started with the words "Ave Maria" but was a different text entirely). Incidentally, Vavilov's original was attributed to "Anonymous" and it was a student of his who perpetuated the hoax that it was by Caccini. Just one of the many musical hoaxes throughout the centuries.
• The Carmina Burana are a collection of poems from the XII-XIII centuries. The music most associated with them was written by German composer Carl Orff... in 1937.
• "Barrett's Privateers" sounds like an old sea shanty, but it was written by Stan Rogers in the 1970s.
• The song "New York, New York" popularized by Frank Sinatra (the one that starts with "Start spreadin' the news...") was written for the 1977 Martin Scorsese musical New York, New York; since the film was based in the Tin Pan Alley era, the song sounded like a tune from that era. Sinatra recorded his version in 1979 and it became the final hit single in his long musical career.
  • In the same vein, the musical Chicago was composed in the mid-1970s but set in 1920s Chicago, with the music clearly evoking the era.
• "Who Do You Think You are Kidding, Mister Hitler" was not composed during the War, but was written especially for the 1960s/70s TV Series Dad's Army and sung by wartime entertainer Bud Flanagan. Most of the incidental music in the series are clips from genuine wartime songs, however.
• The Hokey Pokey, a.k.a. the Hokey Cokey, sounds like something that dates back at least a century — but it only originated in the 1940s.
• "Since I Don't Have You" sounds like it could be a classic Depression-era Tin Pan Alley ballad, and many people assume that it is, but it was written by the members of The Skyliners, who recorded the original hit version in 1958.
• Bluegrass music is a prime example of this trope. Although it has roots in traditional Southern string band music, it only developed as a separate genre in the 1940s. To put it another way, bluegrass is only about a decade older than Rock & Roll. Which, of course, means that many older-than-the-hills bluegrass standards are shockingly young. "Rocky Top", which sounds like it was passed down from generation to generation up in the Smoky Mountains, was written in 1967 (the same year Are You Experienced was recorded) in Nashville. "Fox on the Run" was originally a Manfred Mann song from 1969.
• "Greensleeves" cannot have been written by Henry VIII, as urban myth commonly supposes, as it was written in a style which didn't arrive in England until after his death. (Although the words and music do appear to have originated separately, it is unlikely Henry VIII had a hand in either.) In this case, however, it's only slightly newer than they think: Henry VIII died in 1547, and the song was written by 1580 at the latest. By the time of William Shakespeare, it was already considered an old standard.
• Greek song "Misirlou", popularly known from the Dick Dale guitar version, sounds ancient but its first public performance of note was in 1927. It is probable that it was an earlier composition. It is equally probable that it was not much earlier.
• Pachelbel's "Canon and Gigue in D major" was written prior to 1700. But it was first published in the 1920s, first recorded in 1940, and did not become popular until the late 1970s.
• "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from Cabaret has been mistaken for an actual (translated) Nazi anthem, even by white power music groups, but it was written specifically for the musical.
• "Highland Cathedral", which you'd be forgiven for thinking was a traditional Scottish song, was written in the eighties by two German musicians for a Highland game held in Germany. Ditto "Flower of Scotland", passed down amongst patriotic Scots over the centuries since it was written in 1965, and "Scotland the Brave", which is no older than the early 20th century and whose most usual lyrics were written in 1950.
• Despite its current popularity in folk music, widespread use of the bodhrán as a musical instrument may be no older than the 1960s.
• Ever wonder why you don't see people sing "Happy Birthday" in TV or movies that often? It's because it was still under copyright until the 2010s.
• Many revered hymns that people assume must be hundreds of years old were products of the 20th century. "The Old Rugged Cross" and "In the Garden" were both written in 1912. "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" was first published in 1927. "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" was first published in 1940. "How Great Thou Art" was written in 1953 (it's set to an old Swedish melody, though).
• The Swedish song "En Kungens Man", which tells the story of a medieval woman who almost gets raped by a knight, was written in 1974 by Björn Afzelius, although many think it's an old folk song.
  • Similarly, the folk song "Visa i midsommartid", which many assume to be ancient (what with its references to witchcraft and paganism), was written in 1941.
• Brian May and Roger Taylor (of Queen) frequently remark about how young fans are unaware that "We Will Rock You" hasn't been around since the dawn of time, or as Taylor puts it, "They think it's always just been there, written in stone." It was written (both words and music, the famous Stomp-Stomp-Clap) in 1977 for Queen's album News of the World and despite being a hit pretty much immediately, it was only released as a B-side to "We Are the Champions" in every country. The only exception was a US radio promo 12" single which (following the album) had the two songs on one side in the familiar order of "Rock You" followed by "Champions," which is how they're often still played on rock radio to this day.
• Heavy Metal, at least in its most literal sense. While self-identification in the lyrics has always been a part of punk, rap, and the earliest rock and roll itself, the same was not true of heavy metal. The term "metal" was first coined by the music media in 1970, but it was quite a while before any of the groups to which the genre tag was applied began using it to describe themselves; many even resented the fact that their music was being categorized. Judas Priest, with their 1980 song "Metal Gods", were the first metal group to prominently use the term, and of course Metallica were the first to incorporate it into the name of the band itself. The term was adopted by fans earlier than 1980, at least in part in defiance of the media using it in a negative way. Although for some, Heavy Metal might be Older Than They Think because some assume that the genre didn't exist before the eighties or late seventies.
• While bagpipes of diverse kinds have been around since the Middle Ages, the Great Highland Bagpipe (if you don't know the difference, it's what you picture when you think "bagpipe") didn't exist until around 1800.
• Many believe that Dropkick Murphys' "Tessie" is a direct cover of the turn-of-the-century fight song of the Boston Red Sox fan club The Royal Rooters. It is, in fact, a brand-new song set to the melody of the original fight song and featuring lyrics about the Royal Rooters and their antics. Only sections of the chorus appeared in the original song.
• The steelpan, also known as the steel drum, associated with traditional Caribbean music, first appeared in 1937.
• Many people tend to think Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom" sounds like a song from the eighties, especially with that very late-70/early-80s guitar hook inspired by The Cars' "Just What I Needed". Then there's the fact that the name "Stacy" peaked for babies born in the '70s, so if a song features a tweenage girl named "Stacy", it has no business being from anything other than the '80s. It's from... 2003.
• You'd be excused for thinking the Silversun Pickups were a '90s alt-rock band thanks to their similar style, but they only formed in 2002, releasing their first album in 2006 and seeing "Lazy Eye" chart in 2007.
• Lots of people are shocked to learn that "Long Black Veil" isn't a traditional ballad but was written in 1959 by Nashville songwriters Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill and was originally a hit for Country Music stalwart Lefty Frizzell. Dill himself called it "an instant folk song."
• "O Canada" has been used as Canada's national anthem since 1939 but was not officially adopted until 1980.
• New Zealand only adopted "God Defend New Zealand" as an official national anthem in November 1977, despite having been written in the 1870s and having been used since 1940 as a de facto national song. The Māori version, "Aotearoa", was written in 1878, but only came into common usage alongside the English version around the year 2000.
• Likewise, Australia didn't adopt "Advance Australia Fair" as its official national anthem until 1984. Both New Zealand and Australia previously used "God Save the Queen", which would have been interesting at the Olympic Games if Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand were on the podium together...
  • Until "Advance Australia Fair", "Waltzing Matilda" was a popular de facto anthem in Australia. The same goes for "Pokarekareana" in New Zealand.
• "I'm a Little Teapot" is often assumed to be a traditional Mother Goose nursery rhyme from at least the mid-19th century if not older, but it was not written until 1939 or recorded until the early 1950s!
• The first mention of Flamenco is from 1774. The Romani, who are commonly associated with it, didn't arrive to Spain until the late 15th century and were not considered citizens until (coincidentally) the 18th.
• While it may seem like both genres have always been seen as distinct but related entities like they are now, Post-Punk and New Wave were used pretty much interchangeably in the 1980s (with "new music" also being commonly used), with the differentiation of the two genres not being common until the 1990s after both had gone out of style.
  • The distinction between thrash and death metal is recent too. For instance, the band Kreator would have been considered death metal if they came around today but were thrash in the eighties.
• The "sirtaki" Greek dance popularised by Zorba the Greek was choreographed specifically for that film, although it is influenced by a genuine Greek dance called the "hasapiko".
• The notion of sitting quietly in your seat during classical music dates from the mid-19th century. The Other Wiki says that sneezes and coughs should be held until a loud section of music is reached (!) but talking and eating during performance was once commonplace.
  • Haydn's "Surprise" and "Joke" Symphonies were written, because of his annoyance at this, to startle or confuse his audiences.
  • Don't forget that what we call "classical" music was, in its time, current popular music. Thus, opera audiences were often more boisterous than in the modern day, yelling at characters on stage, or singing along to favorite choruses. A particularly novel new piece of music that broke expected conventions might well be booed and hissed in the middle of the performance. And a magnetic solo virtuoso like a Paganini or a Liszt would have the ladies swooning in their seats like an early sixties' The Beatles concert.
    • Possibly (though what was going on in music halls and salons had more to do with the general pop scene of the 20th century — there wasn't really a direct equivalent out there before recorded music became possible and affordable)... however, the word "classical" as it's now popularly used — anything where you shelve the record by who wrote the music rather than who performed it, basically — is not how it would have been used in 1850 or thereabouts. The "Classical" era began around the end of the 17th century and finished in the early 19th. Puccini, Elgar, Schumann etc., technically didn't write "classical" music, even when they wrote for orchestras.
  • The 'tradition' of silence during a concert originated by mistake with — like so much else — a request by Richard Wagner (mid-19th century) for the audience not to applaud between some key dramatic points of one of his operas; and even he was alarmed when it was interpreted as an instruction to be silent throughout.
  • Wagner also invented the practice of darkening the auditorium for his operas — now almost universal practice in conventional Western theaters. Before this, the opera and theatre were yet another social occasion — the room would be well-lit because the audience would be in their most spectacular clothes and were there to be seen. The opera was more of a cabaret affair, with only the diehard musos in the audience giving it their full attention. This is partly why early operas have characters repeat their important lyrics repeatedly!
  • In theatre, not only was it was usual for audience members to talk (and heckle) freely during performances, but they could also move freely around the auditorium, into backstage areas, the wings and even onto the stage itself. It was only in the latter half of the 18th century that David Garrick, in his capacity as manager of Drury Lane Theatre, began making the first moves to curtail this.
    • Some horrifyingly deadly fires (in the lower-culture, very crowded music halls) caused changes in the law that also mostly put an end to the open, cabaret-style auditorium with tables and loose seats, at least in such large venues. 19th-century 'lime-lights' (yes, a real thing, made by heating insanely caustic quicklime to extreme temperature with what amounts to an oxyacetylene cutter) had a regrettable tendency to start fires very quickly, and such auditoriums were impossible to evacuate fast enough.
• "Godzilla's Theme" is a very iconic and recognizable piece of music that transcends the films in which it originated in a way. One could easily assume it's been around if the series has (since 1954, that is), but the theme didn't appear in its current, familiar form until 1991. While the theme is in fact a medley of two tracks which date back to the first three films, you won't find the exact combination you've heard anywhere in the first 17 films.
• The song "O Death" is often thought to be centuries old and even from Medieval times, when it is an American folk song from the 1920s.
  • Ralph Stanley's iconic rendition of the song (as heard in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) was recorded specifically for the film, which also featured "I'll Fly Away" (first catalogued in 1929; Alison Krauss' rendition was again a OBWAT original).
• The opening ensemble that introduces the setting and all major characters and establishes the tone of the show figures prominently in classifications of the song types of Broadway musicals usually have. However, this type of big opening number wasn't common until the 1960s; "Comedy Tonight" from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, though deliberately styled as a Genre Throwback incorporating a lot of old shticks, is one of the earliest (and one of the longest) of its kind.
• "Love Is a Rose" is not a hundred-year-old folk song. It was written by Neil Young in the early 1970s. Likewise, the melody to "Slip Away" sounds like an antique ballad but was written by Young.
• Since most Classical Music pieces that everyone knows date to the Classical Era (circa 1730 to 1820) or Romantic era (roughly 1810 to the end of the 19th century)^note The Baroque Era is also fairly well known. Think Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel., it's only natural to assume that Boléro is from somewhere in that period. Wrong, it was composed by Maurice Ravel in 1928. Mickey Mouse is older than Boléro.
• "Sabre Dance", composed by Aram Khachaturian in 1941, is widely believed to be a piece from the turn of the 20th century, due to its similarities to the 1900 piece "Flight of the Bumblebee".
• Since the folk band Patrick Street covered Penguin Cafe Orchestra's "Music for a Found Harmonium" in 1990, the piece has become so accepted as an Irish reel that many versions credit it as "Traditional". It was first recorded in 1984, and composer Simon Jeffes died in 1997, so it will be in copyright for quite a while to come.
• "Yo Soy Boricua, Pa'que tu lo sepas" is a famous patriotic chant used by Puerto Ricans. Many don't know it comes from an actual song. A song by Taino that's from 1995 at that.
• The Czech, Moravian-Wallachian band Fleret, especially in their long collaboration with the folklore singer Jarmila Šuláková, have pulled off their folk-rock blend so successfully that many people aren't aware that the song "Ovečky zaběhnuté" isn't a genuine folk song. Jarmila Šuláková's experienced singing, and the fact it was released on an album that was half genuine folk songs, helps to sell it. But the album was only released in 1995.
• "Baby, It's Cold Outside" owes most of its status as one of the classic Christmas Songs to its Revival by Commercialization in the 2003 Elf. Before then, it was just a plain old Great American Songbook standard, associated more with composer Frank Loesser and its Academy Award for Best Original Song than with the season (though a few singers had included it on holiday-themed albums). In Europe, it became a popular Christmas song only slightly earlier, thanks to Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews' 1999 recording (prior to which it was obscure enough that many people were unaware it was a cover version).
  • The first known takedown of the song's lyrics for their problematic undertones of non-consent and Date Rape occurred in a 2004 National Post article, which might be a marginal Older Than They Think case as well. Of course, the general raciness of the lyrics had already drawn a lot of condemnation from Moral Guardians back in The '40s. Egyptian Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb (who was a visiting college professor in Colorado at the time) famously wrote a condemnation of the song (which he'd heard at a church dance).
• When Simon & Garfunkel recorded "El Cóndor Pasa (If I Could)", they assumed that the melody was an ancient Peruvian folk song. It was in fact written in 1913, and the songwriter's son successfully sued Paul Simon.
• "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is usually associated with the viral video where it plays over footage from the 1929 Disney short The Skeleton Dance. So, one might be forgiven for thinking the song itself is of a similar vintage, or even that the cartoon and the song were always the same. The song, by Andrew Gold, is from 1996. The video combining the two was ripped from a 1998 Disney Sing Along Songs tape called "Happy Haunting Party at Disneyland".
• "V Oktabrye", the Soviet sailor song that appears at the beginning of The Hunt for Red October is an old Red Navy song, right? Wrong. it was written for the film, by American Basil Poledouris, in 1990, the year before the Soviet Union fell. Not that that stopped the Russian Navy from proudly adopting it.
• Similarly, the Luftwaffe March featured in Battle of Britain was not an authentic World War II march but was written in 1970 specifically for the film. It simply sounds so much like the real thing people assume it is. Also, like the above, it was cheerfully adopted by both the East and West German airforces.
• The phrase "Dance like nobody's watching" originated in the Country Music song "Come from the Heart", written by Richard Leigh and Susanna Clark, first recorded by Don Williams in 1987 and more famously by Kathy Mattea in 1989.
• The sea shanty "What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?" is usually associated with the era of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, but the earliest record of it dates to 1839, by which point steamships already existed. Furthermore, it appears to have been highly obscure until the 20th century, as it does not appear in any of the major 19th-century sea shanty collections; earlier versions were also much shorter, with the more colorful lyrics ("Put him in bed with the captain's daughter", etc.) being modern inventions.
• "Always Look on the Bright Side" was written for Life of Brian in 1979; because of its stiff-upper-lip message people have reported their grandparents remembering it from the Depression or WWII.
• The ukelele was first introduced to Hawaii in 1879 by a group of Portuguese immigrants, who also became Hawaii's first ukelele-makers.
• The English folk song "The Bastard King of England" dates only to 1927.
• The ubiquitous "Charge" fanfare in American sports, which can be heard at any baseball game (usually played on an organ), was written in 1946 by University of Southern California undergraduate student Tommy Walker.
• While the term "Alternative music" dates back to 1979, it wasn't a ubiquitous umbrella genre term until around 1991, when Perry Farrell used it to describe the varied, but largely guitar-oriented, bands on his Lollapalooza touring festival, and The Grammys began to award a Best Alternative Music Album trophy. MTV's Alternative Nation popularized it shortly thereafter. During the '80s, when alternative bands like R.E.M. were beginning to break through to the mainstream, a variety of terms were used to describe the style, including "post-modern", "college rock", "modern rock" (which Billboard and radio preferred) and "techno rock" (this one specifically referring to post-new wave rock bands that used synthesizers, like The Cure and Depeche Mode).
• Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was written in 1880; in fact, Tchaikovsky wasn't even born until 1840.
  • The Overture's use of "La Marseillaise" also brings up another example; while the song was introduced as France's national anthem in 1795, Napoleon banned it in 1805, and it didn't become the national anthem again until 1879, just one year before the 1812 Overture was written.
• The ballad "Scarborough Fair", made famous by Simon & Garfunkel, is often assumed to be a centuries-old, or even medieval piece. Its melody was first transcribed in 1947, just 18 years before S&G recorded their version. Furthermore, the duo set the song in counterpoint with "Canticle", which was a reworking of Simon's own song "The Side of a Hill", which he wrote in 1963.
• People tend to think of disco music as being sold on 12" singles, and a small number of singles were released on that format from 1976 onwards, but mostly as a promotional tool for DJs. It was only in 1979 — the last year that disco was huge — that it became a commonplace retail format. Before that, most disco singles were released only on 7", with extended versions kept for the album.
• "Für Elise", one of Ludwig van Beethoven's most famous pieces, wasn't published until 40 years after his death, in 1867.
• The lyrics to "Kimigayo", the national anthem of Japan, are incredibly old; they date to the 12th century at the latest, having been lifted from a Heian-era waka poem. However, they were not set to music until 1880, the melody and arrangement both being strongly influenced by Western church hymns.
• It’s easy to think that “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers came out in the 1970’s or 1980’s, but it came out in 1993.
• For many younger kids, the Macarena could be seen as an age-old traditional folk melody, like "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad", but it was written in the 1990s, although, anyone born before the year 2000 knows that.
• The Japanese folk song "Sakura Sakura" is often assumed to be ancient. Nope. The piece dates only to the mid-19th century, at the end of the Edo period, being a typical urban melody of the time. It didn't achieve wide popularity until the Tokyo Academy of Music used it as a beginner's song in their 1888 Collection of Japanese Koto Music for koto students. It became a standard piece in Japanese school curricula from there.
• Despite being a staple of traditional Colombian music, the whole "carranga" musical genre was invented by Jorge Velosa in the 70's.
• The children's song "If You're Happy and You Know It", which you might think has been passed down through countless generations, was first published in 1957. The similarity of its melody to "Molodejnaya" from the 1938 Soviet movie musical Volga-Volga (the major difference being that the main melody lines of "Molodejnaya" have two extra notes) has led to speculation of some distant connection between the two, but none has ever been found.
• " Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree ", a popular nursery rhyme, was written in 1932 and is still under copyright. As such, musicians can, and have been 'sued' for using snippets of a song that is ingrained in Australian culture.
• The term "Hair Metal" was invented early in The '90s (one early citation is in a 1996 issue of the college radio trade magazine CMJ New Music Report), long after the genre's heyday. In The '80s, "pop metal", "glam metal", "lite metal" or "mainstream metal" were the usual terms used for it.
• The first wide-spread suggestion of the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" — i.e. that Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon can be synchronized to the visuals of The Wizard of Oz, and the two will appear to match up with each other — appeared in a 1995 Fort Wayne Journal Gazette article by journalist Charles Savage, 22 years after the album's release. ^note  This article acknowledges that it did happen before, and the early internet days allowed it to spread, but it likely originated later than most would think. It almost certainly didn't exist before 1980, when Wizard was first released on home video, and thus could easily be synced up with Moon.
• "Pop Goes the Weasel" was first published in sheet music form around 1852. The melody probably dates to the 1600s, but the lyrics don't appear to have existed before 1850.
• Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor was written as early as 1704, but was not published until 1833, until which point it survived in a single manuscript copied by music teacher Johannes Ringk c. 1725. Felix Mendelssohn played its first known public performance, in 1840, and the exposure he gave to it gradually increased its fame from there, but it did not become one of Bach's better-known pieces, or a classical standard, until the early 20th century.
• Devo didn't adopt their trademark "energy dome" hats until the cover photo for 1980's Freedom of Choice, their third album.

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