As the song of the summer debate rages on, it’s easy to forget that there is one song that timelessly represents the season for many people: the scratchy, glockenspiel version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” The folks over at CBC Music recently posted a brief history of ice cream truck music, including the story behind the chime box itself (from a certified ethnomusicologist at that).
The first ice cream trucks back in the 1920s bumped this hot track whilst crawling through neighborhoods. Then, as the mobile treat machines became more ubiquitous after WWII, one company manufactured music boxes specifically for ice cream trucks and equipped them with the classics that will forever be equated with chewing gum eyeballs, like “Little Brown Jug,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Sailing Sailing.”