Does anyone like the Oak Ridge Boys?

Giddy-up-a-oom-pa-pa-oom-pa-pa-mow mow

So today I learned that the original hook to "Elvira" goes "my heart's on fi-rah/for Elvi-rah!"

If you're gonna record a patently silly song, why leave out the most ridiculous part!? It's not like forces that be in 1981 were worried about pop music corrupting proper enunciation when there was all that satanism about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXoP5IpUrqI

Patently silly!?!? This is a song about an orgasm!

Also, I think that’s how they sing the hook in the version I know

here's a story involving the oak ridge boys, will probably ramble because I am very sick. also I'm gonna be vague for reasons that will be obvious. ok so about six years ago h'wood is remaking a movie and the movie they're remaking had a brief snippet where the lead actress ad-libs a tune, she made it up just while they were shooting in the original and they kept it -- they want somebody to write an actual song from that snippet. to me this is a way cooler assignment than I'm used to getting from h'wood guys! they're specific about what they want it to sound like, contemporaneous 70s country, which is a pretty specific pop-country vibe -- they reference conway twitty in their ask. now I can write this song but I'm probably not the singer for it, but I can probably pass enough to get a demo together. around this time I have some kind of exchange on twitter with the oak ridge boys and they're pretty obviously doing their own tweets, or one of them is, it's an all-caps feed. so I have my manager call theirs and say hey fellas, possible gig here, song's supposed to have a 70s country feel and we thought you'd be perfect, once the ink's dry are you down? and they are DOWN. very excited. they send me a copy of their latest signed by all of em and it's wild. but as is always the case with music stuff, we then say, ok, well, song's written, now we have to go demo it and you can tell us if you like it, we assume you're on the hook for our studio costs right? oh no not yet boss, we can cover that once everything's nice n legal but there's really not much budget for music*, ok lol I have been here before and I know how this ends but I also really want the gig so I say fuck it and pay for a half day in studio to track a demo. now, a demo means what it says -- I'm not doing anything but putting down rhythm section, vocals, and in this case piano -- bgvs here too for proof of concept, but what I do not have the money to do is spend half a week in the studio trying to make it sound like a conway twitty record in the 70s. we can do whatever instrumentation once we're in contract, what you're getting now is a demo, with me singing, not the oak ridge boys. so we track it, it's honestly pretty sweet, it's got that "the chorus would mean one thing by itself but means something different in context" thing country tunes specialize in. but! I am not a country singer, and I'm the singer we've got, what I do is very much an either-you're-down-or-you're-not quality and now you, too, know how this ends. we get notes from the director and it's a whole bunch of instrumental requests -- "orchestral accents"! vocal should be more like Richard Marx! we want pedal steel! well umm I did mention we're doing this on our own nickel so far, right? best case scenario is if we can fly the track out to the ORBs, who are still very stoked and sending me all-caps emails, and they put down vocals which btw the director wants by Friday. By Friday! My man we are not under contract, do I look like an asshole? But I am an asshole, because I want the gig, but also I just am not gonna rustle up strings real or virtual and a pedal steel guy by Friday, so it goes away, then years later we made a record in the studio where the ORBs tracked a bunch of their classic stuff but that's another story.

listening to the song now for the first time since then I think it would have been good sung by a pro country singer but that opening on a maj9 was probably a mistake, but, you know, I gotta be me

*had I known how many times I'd hear this exact line over the course of a career in music, I'd've kept a tally. It's brazen. these are people with multimillion dollar budgets, and they always say this.

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