I have a lot of fragments of song lyrics in my head. If you are like me, there are songs that you can sing a few bars and then can’t remember all of the words. Some of the song fragments I know come from musicals. My mother had quite a few albums of musicals and when I got old enough, I would put them on the turntable for a listen to songs like:

Hello, Dolly,
La, la, la, Dolly
it’s so nice to have you back where you belong
Your looking swell, Dolly
I can tell, Dolly,You’re still something and something and something
and still goin’ strong.
There are more words
I cannot remember
and I think somewhere the verse ends with
Dolly never go away again.

or
Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger . . .

I don’t know any more of that song. And I used to sing bits and pieces of it because we have a friend whose brother Sam is married to a woman named Janet. I kept wanting to find an occasion to sing “Sam and Janet evening, you may see a stranger.” I should have looked up the lyrics so I could sing more.

I know a lot of hymns. Some of them I have all of the verses memorized. Most of the hymns I have memorized I’ve been singing since I was a child which means that for one reason or another the words have been changed in the hymnal we currently use in our church. Combine my less than perfect memory with my less than perfect eyesight and I can sing the wrong words even with an open hymnal in my hands. Fortunately the people who sit near me in church are pretty tolerant.

And I know a lot of fragments of kids’ songs. I like to sing them with enthusiasm. Sometimes when I don’t know the words, I just make up new ones. Lots of songs for children are easy to adapt. Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo, for example is mostly just repeating Abiyoyo. We had the book and I would sing the lyrics before I had ever heard the tune. Then we discovered a recording of Pete Seeger singing the song. By then, however, I had memorized my own tune and adapted the words. For the life of me, I can’t sing that song the way it was intended. It is a song about a little boy who played a ukulele and all the grown ups wanted him to stop playing it. And his dad was a magician that folks wanted to get out of town. Then a monster came and the people wanted the magician to make it disappear and the people decided that the ukulele was a good thing if the magician could make the monster disappear. The monster’s name was Abiyoyo. Pete Seeger sang the song with the story all in the right order so it made sense, but all I ever did was sing the word “Abiyoyo” over and over again to a made up tune. I never did learn the song.

And there are a lot of other fragments of songs in this old brain. Sometimes they come out in bits and pieces. Sometimes they come out with a bit more volume than my wife, kids, or grandkids want. Sometimes they make people smile.

One of those songs is Bill Harley’s Zanzibar. I can remember Bill Harley’s name because there is a big Harley Davidson motorcycle rally in the town where we lived for 25 years. The song begins something like this:

Zanzibar, Zanzibar,
Zanzibar is very far
You can’t get there in a car
Don’t take your car to Zanzibar

Zanzibar, they don’t have tar
To put on roads to drive their cars
Men and women smoke cigars
There’s no tar in Zanzibar

Then I usually repeat the first lines as if it were a chorus. What is a bit funny about this song is that I can remember the story. Bill Harley was supposed to write a report on another country when he was in school, but he waited until the last minute and didn’t do his research. With the deadline looming he grabbed the last volume of the encyclopedia, opened it to the page about Zanzibar and wrote a song. There are verses about growing cloves and ground nuts and tea, but I can’t remember them, except that the song bends the word Africa to become Afriki so it will rhyme with tea. But I do remember this much:

Zanzibar, Zanzibar,
Zanzibar is very far
You can’t get there in a car
Don’t take your car to Zanzibar

The song came to my mind as I read a news story about scientists who were sorting through data from previous scientific studies. They used computers to compare pictures of whales that had been taken by researchers in different parts of the world over the years. The computers looked for features that identified individual whales, such as scars, markings on the flukes, and the like. Which reminds me that I think there is a song that is about whale flukes and people playing flutes, but I can’t remember it. Anyway, the computers sifted through a lot of photos and came up with a few identifications. One was a picture of a humpback whale off the Pacific coast of Columbia in 2017. The same whale showed up in a photograph taken in 2022, off the coast of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. Humpback whales are known for long migrations. They feed in the cold waters near the poles and breed in the warm waters near the equator. They have been sighted in all of the oceans of the world. But never before had a migration as long as Columbia to Zanzibar been documented. That’s over 8,000 miles if you use the closest route, which is a great circle route. Whales, however, don’t fly the great circle route. They swim in oceans and swim around land masses. The whale had certainly gone farther than the most direct route between the two places.

I don’t know why the whale made the trip. Maybe it was looking for a mate, though you might think it would have encountered others along its journey. Maybe it was looking for food, though it must have found a lot of food to sustain such a trip. Maybe it had its natural migration disrupted by climate change. Or maybe it got a song lyric stuck in its brain and decided to check out the rest of the lyrics:

Zanzibar, Zanzibar,
Zanzibar is very far
You can’t get there in a car
Don’t take your car to Zanzibar