“Surrey With The Fringe On Top” – Blossom Dearie

I hate “Surrey With The Fringe On Top.”

Yes, I agree it serves a function in “Oklahoma,” and I suppose it serves it well. But isolated from its context – the way most people hear it most frequently – it sounds like the country cousin of

blackface, an urbanite’s hokey caricature of what the yokels in the middle of the country might listen to. The pronounced rhythm scheme – BAH, bop-BAH, bop-BAH, bop BAH-DAH-DAH – is irritating enough, but layer in lyrics with a cadence that matches the beat and we have ourselves the aural equivalent of a baby walker, something that will help the little darlings get across the dance floor safely without hurting themselves, just remember to close the door to the basement steps.

And ducks and geese and pigs in the first line? Kill me now.

I recall hearing it in my teens and cringing in revulsion: please, lord, not that crap again. And then one year “Oklahoma” was my high school’s musical; for three months the horror was inescapable.

One night in my early 20s I and some friends stumbled into Sammy’s Roumanian on Chrystie. The restaurant had cleared a small space in the far rear corner of the packed dining room for a two-man band. Both members appeared to be nonagenarians, I assume husband and wife, both wearing coke bottle glasses that made them look out at their audience in a manner that suggested they were worried the entire crowd might inexplicably wink out of existence at any moment – it’s happened before, you know, a pity, really. As we walked in, the fellow started bouncing his fingers on a bottom-of-the-line Casio keyboard set to Musical Cheese, and the gal started warbling “Surrey With The Fringe On Top.” Lovely people, no doubt, but the evening could not have got worse, which should indicate how very low my regard is for that song, and how very, very wrong I can be about things getting worse.

Sometime later I discovered Blossom Dearie and her version of “Surrey With a Fringe On Top.”

Covers remind you of the original. An interpretation takes a song and makes it new. Peggy Lee, Marlene Dietrich, and Nat Cole are among the many vocalists who have covered that song, and I dislike nearly all of those versions.

But Dearie decided to chuck the song’s blueprint, and came up with an almost entirely new “Surrey With The Fringe On Top.” Have I mentioned how much I adore that song?

The song was written as a hopeful invitation. Dearie’s inspiration was to turn it into a sexy come-on. She slows the tempo to a languid pace. There is no hint of equine clomping in her piano, nor in Ray Brown’s elegant and spare bass, nor in the brushes drawn subtly across the drums. She sings in her trademark little-girl sigh, with a knowing inflection that makes it clear she is not a little girl. The cadence of the lyric is no longer a blatant reference to horses; it now intimates the suggestive sway of her surrey.

Ducks? Geese? Pigs? Why, Miss Blossom, riding here with you, I can’t say as I noticed.

Dearie’s romantic version of “Surrey” was not the first time I heard demonstrated the difference between merely covering a song and interpreting it, but it’s my most memorable example of how interpretation can turn hate to love.

The phenomenon must be common enough. Stephen Frears not only recognized it but was able to deliberately reproduce it in the film “High Fidelity." John Cusack’s Rob Gordon arrives at a bar. From inside, he hears the opening strains of a "Baby I Love Your Way." "Is that Peter fucking Frampton?" he indignantly asks the bouncer. Once inside Rob (and his friends) find themselves captivated by Lisa Bonet’s aching rendition. I didn’t just know what was happening in that scene; I had already felt it, several times over.

I love Joe Cocker’s charged growl through “She Came InThrough the Bathroom Window,” as much as I do The Byrd’s chiming version of “Mr.Tambourine Man,” The English Beat’s nifty ska-ification of “Tears of A Clown,” Puddles’ melancholy rendition of Lorde’s “Royals,” and Lydia Loveless’ honky-tonk workout of “They Don’t Know.” They all did enough to make their versions distinctive, but none of them taught me anything about the originals.

There’s a lot in Little Feat’s catalog that I love, but the band’s output is uneven, especially the earlier disks. “I’ve Been The One” made no impression on me at all. Syd Straw (with The Golden Palominos) found both the pain and the wistfulness latent in the lyric, and she turned it into almost an entirely new song that can still stop me in my tracks.

Go listen to Frank Sinatra’s largely forgotten version of “TryA Little Tenderness.” Now crank up Otis Redding’s sublime smolder-to-a-burn reworking. That’s how to not just interpret but seize ownership of a song.

Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” left me cold, but I love Walk Off The Earth’s version. Their rendition is hardly a radical departure from the original, but maybe that just goes to show that you don’t have to change the beat, the tempo, the idiom (or all three) to create a successful interpretation.

And then artists can try so hard to interpret a song that they lose it entirely.

Pat Boone deserves all the disapproval he gets as the proud epitome of musical exsanguination, taking often extraordinary music and deliberately leaching from it all emotion and relevance. Paul Anka’s misguided lounge version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” might be the apotheosis of … something, I’m not sure of what, but it’s bad.

A few years back, somebody who really ought to have known better decided to turn “Take Five” into some sort of easy listening / hip-hop / pop hybrid. “Take Five” was composed in 5/4 – that’s part of the point – but these people decided to record it in 4/4, demonstrating that not only can a song be interpreted, but also badly misinterpreted. I can’t find it to identify the perpetrators, but I didn’t look hard, for fear of accidentally hearing a few bars. My default impulse is to give artists points for trying, but sometimes you just have to actually hand out demerits for getting it so wrong.