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I love listening to a wide variety of music. And even though I tend not to favor tunes on the golf course - the ambient sounds of birdsong, wind and whatever else is in the air tend to be good enough for me - I make good use of my Apple Music subscription with a variety of songs and playlists.
It is a rare treat to detect some reference - overt or subtle - to golf in popular music. It's an occasional occurrence at best, but always amusing. Golf may not be quite as musically inclined as, say, baseball ("Take Me Out To The Ballgame" is sport's most famous song by far; folk singer Chuck Brodsky penned an entire album of odes to the diamond), but there's a thread of golf references in popular music that goes back decades.
In 1948, avid golfer Bing Crosby penned what is believed to be the first pop song about golf: "Straight Down The Middle," commissioned for a short film called "Honor Caddy." True to it's era, it's both catchy and kitschy.
In recent years, golf has been less the subject of songs and more peripheral. Two album covers come to mind for their golf imagery. The first is Willie Nelson's 1968 album "Good Times," where the fedora-clad crooner, a confirmed golf obsessive for decades, helps a young woman putt.
A decade later, golf figured prominently on another iconic album cover from another end of the music spectrum. "Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" was the eponymous offbeat art-rock band's debut album, and uses golf in a more ironic way than "Good Times." As the story goes, Devo founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were looking for inspiration in a local department store and happened upon a box of golf balls with the legendary Chi Chi Rodriguez's face on it. Casale described golf as "almost symbolically the most lame kind of, you know, bourgeois pursuit that you could have, especially at that time," according to this proxymusic.club article. The face that ultimately appeared on the album was a slight alteration of that of Rodriguez, with influences from several recent presidents. Rodriguez passed away last Thursday at the age of 88, forever the golf icon of New Wave music.
Three songs also stick out in my memory for their passing golf references. Late, great folk singer John Prine references the game in his song "It's a Big Old Goofy World" from his 1991 album "The Missing Years":
I know a fella
He eats like a horse
Knocks his old balls
Round the old golf course...
As a 90s kid, I remember hearing the fast-flying lyrics of the 1998 Barenaked Ladies hit "One Week" everywhere from TV to the supermarket stereo. But until recently, I had never listened to the song closely enough to catch the golf reference in it:
Gonna get a set of better clubs
Gonna find the kind with tiny nubs
Just so my irons aren't always flying off the back-swing...
More recently, one of the bands I find myself listening to a good bit is Vampire Weekend. Their five albums each receive a lot of play from me, but their third LP, "Modern Vampires of the City (2013) is probably my favorite, in part for the song "Diane Young" and the lyrics of the second verse, which begins:
Out of control, but you're playin' a role
Do you think you can go to the eighteenth hole
Or will you flip-flop the day of the championship?
Try to go it alone on your own for a bit...
What golf-adjacent songs do you like best?
