Where My Rosemary Goes

Colorful music notes from Pixabay 

For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday, Jim asks us for a spicy song… I mean a song that mentions a spice. I think rosemary counts because people use it to add flavor to food. This is what Google says:

“Rosemary [...] is a fragrant evergreen shrub with needle-like leaves native to the Mediterranean region. It features blue, purple, pink, or white flowers, belongs to the mint family, and is widely used for culinary flavoring, aromatic oils, and ornamental landscaping." 

So, it’s a spice, yay! Oh wait…

I also discovered that rosemary is technically an herb, not a spice, "because it consists of the fresh or dried green, needle-like leaves of a woody shrub in the mint family. In culinary terms, people often group it with general seasonings or 'spices,' but botanically herbs come from leaves while spices come from roots, bark, seeds, or fruits."

OK, then. Not really a spice, but whatever, too late now. 

This is what Edison Lighthouse says about rosemary:

She ain't got no money

Her clothes are kinda funny

Her hair is kinda wild and free

Oh, but love grows

Where my Rosemary goes

And nobody knows like me

Aww, I guess that's nice, in a sort of backhanded compliment kind of way. "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" was written by Tony Macaulay and Barry Mason* and released in 1970. These guys were not members of the British pop band Edison Lighthouse (formerly Greenfield Hammer), however; the members were Tony Burrows (lead vocalist), Stuart Edwards (lead guitar), David Taylor (bass guitar), George Weyman (drums), and Ray Dorey (guitar).

She talks kinda lazy

And people say she's crazy

And her life's a mystery

Oh, but love grows

Where my Rosemary goes

And nobody knows like me

Thank gawd she has these guys singing a ballad at her, since no one else seems to like her. Geez. The reason I really like this song is because I named one of the main characters in a novel Rosemary, but like most of my ambitious writing projects, it fizzled out. Well, not totally: it ended up as a long short story in my Sidewalk Noodles book, but poor Rosemary gets only two mentions there, so not exactly a main character any longer, is she?

There's something about

Her hand holding mine

It's a feeling that's fine

And I just gotta say, hey!

She's really got a magical spell

And it's working so well

That I can't get away

So she's like a witch? Lyrics from Genius. Listen to the whole song here, if you like.

*This is really weird, but today (Thursday) I saw another one of Fandango's "loosely based" posts and decided I would write one of my song fiction posts on Tom Jones' song "Delilah" combined with the Plain White T's song "Hey There Delilah," and just now when I looked up the writers of "Love Grows," I found out that Barry Mason also wrote "Delilah." Mind blown! Anyway, you, dear reader, are not going to see this fascinating paragraph until Sunday morning, as that's when we schedule our posts for Jim's SLS, but tonight (Thursday) I am going to write the Delilah post, which you will probably see tomorrow (Friday) morning. I want to do a good job on it, but I also need to do a 3-mile exercise walk, so I might end up too tired to finish the post since I haven't started it yet. It's all clear in my mind though. Sort of...