Driving into work this beautiful spring morning, which followed a (personally, not weather-induced) miserable preceding day and night, I listened to the soundtrack from The Harder They Come, the one reggae album even non-reggae fans need to own. (How it didn’t end up on The Hold Steady’s 10 essential albums list is beyond me!) As Toots & the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop” started up and I tried to hum along with Toots I was struck, as I have been for the past 10 or 15 years, by my declining ability to hum. Although I was more of a whistler, I used to enjoy humming out a tune as a kid. Sometime in my late 30s or early 40s I began to notice that humming felt extremely uncomfortable, giving me a sensation somewhere between the feeling of a limb that has fallen asleep and the moment in the intro to The Six Million Dollar Man when Steve Austin says, “She’s breaking up!” Maybe it’s my receding gums. Maybe it’s the lack of protection afforded by my chicken lips. Whatever it is, I’m always a little disappointed that I can’t hum along exuberantly with Toots at the beginning of “Pressure Drop.”

Even if I could still hum with the freedom and comfort that I did as a kid, I would not have been able to project my hum and even have a raspy quality to it, the way Toots does. That got me thinking, there must be other songs that feature actual humming. My guess is that these songs have not been compiled and discussed in one place before, or at least as thoroughly as they can be compiled and discussed here. In short, Last Man Standing: Songs With Humming Parts.

Go!