Bicycle Built for Two
July 4, 2019
NAT KING COLE sings another traditional American tune. A commenter at Youtube writes:
Growing up, my parents often had to pay more attention to my autistic brother than to me, so I spent much of my time with my grandfather. This was his favorite song, and when I was sad he would always sing it to me to make me feel better. I watched him die a few years ago, the most horrific experience of my life. I like to go shopping at antique malls and a month ago on the anniversary of his death, I went to one to cheer myself up. I think he was there with me that day because shortly after I walked in, I found a little music box that plays this tune. I immediately bought it and it’s now my most prized possession.
— Comments —
Alan writes:
Thank you for that refreshing ride on “A Bicycle Built for Two”.
It must have been in 1953 or ’54 when I first heard that song, sometimes also called “Daisy, Daisy”. It was part of a medley with “The Sidewalks of New York” on one side of a ten-inch plastic record my mother bought for me. “Ten Little Indians” was on the other side. It was a “Picture-Play Record” for children, one of a series of such records released by the Record Guild of America in New York City.
I still have it, although I haven’t played it in more than 60 years. It shows a little boy and girl on a bicycle built for two against an orange background of a streetscape in New York. I played the record so often in the mid-1950s that my grandparents probably got tired of hearing it. I imagine they may have remembered it from when it was new in the 1890s.
The record lodged itself into my mother’s memory as well as mine. One day in the 1990s I sat with her at her dining room table and, at age 75, she still knew the words by heart.
It is one of those songs from the turn of the century that could lift your spirits. It lifted mine on many days in my boyhood. The same feeling was projected in Nat Cole’s 1963 Capitol Records LP Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer, which I had and played that year and which included the gorgeous ballad “That Sunday, That Summer”.
