Ben Folds | Listening In

Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a collection called “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!: Non-Lexical Vocables” curated by Music Library associate Melanie Armstrong.

This playlist began as a discussion with a friend online a couple months ago. I had shared a song that I’d had stuck in my head and my friend said that it was their least favorite song by the group because (and I quote) “SHA LA LA is a terrible lyric 🙂”. The discussion that followed was all in good fun, but led me to want to research songs that have nonsense syllables in them just to prove that “sha la la” is NOT (necessarily) a terrible lyric.

scat singing notation

Vocals like “sha la la” in songs are called non-lexical vocables. Basically, they are nonsense syllables which may or may not be mixed together with meaningful text and they appear in all manner of different musics. This, of course, led to me being extra geeky and having a lot of fun creating a playlist highlighting a variety of different songs that use nonsense syllables in this way. In point of fact, it goes all the way back to at least the middle ages with songs using things like “fa la la” in them – but I decided to stick to more modern examples for playlist purposes. Which means this playlist starts with some scat singing (from circa the 1920s-1940s) and goes on from there.

Your mileage may vary in terms of your tolerance of the non-lexical vocable, but I maintain that sometimes one doesn’t need an actual word to create musical meaning and that non-lexical vocables can be super fun!