“Shake, Rattle and Roll”, Big Joe Turner, 1954, Charles Calhoun (Jesse Stone). #1 US R&B. Marsh’s Heart of Rock & Soul #13.

Shake, rattle and roll? In this economy?

The second stanza here, where Turner is singing about the sun shining through the woman’s dress? You know what that reminds me of? I’ll just pause for a second while you can marshal your thoughts.

(Pause.)

It’s the Billy Crystal comedy movie City Slickers, of course. What else could I be talking about? There’s a scene in City Slickers where Crystal’s character is talking to Jack Palance’s old cowboy character, Curly, about Life And Stuff, and Palance relates how when he was young he saw a beautiful woman, also backlit by the sun, “showing the shape that God had give her”.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But now that I think of it, the fourth Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, has a scene where the main characters are walking through Hyde Park and some nutcase is giving a speech where he says, “The purpose of the sun going down in the afternoon, especially in parks, is to make women’s breasts bounce up and down more visibly to the eye.”

I think the odds are pretty low that City Slickers or So Long and Thanks for All the Fish were specifically influenced by “Shake, Rattle and Roll”. So is this just a thing three separate people happened to comment on? Or is it an actual trope? But I do know one thing: none of Big Joe Turner, Curly, or the weirdo in the park were capable of being normal about a woman’s body. Turner calls the woman in the song “the devil”. Curly runs away and builds a philosophy about it. And the weirdo in the park, uh, makes a weird speech in a park. Maybe everybody calm down a bit. Women are around. Sometimes it’s sunny.