The introduction of the words "not fade away" at the end of the first stanza is complicated by Holly's signature hiccup, which I've indicated with ( ah!). Well you know my love (ah!) not fade away. Transcripts vary quite a bit, but here is how I would render the first stanza of the original Buddy Holly recording (you can hear it on this YouTube clip while watching a spinning 78): Take, for example, the Justin Timberlake song "SexyBack" (discussed by Semantic Compositions here), which uses as its title the last two words of the line, "I'm bringin' sexy back." (Of course, to appreciate that as a well-formed sequence requires a construal of sexy as a noun.) The case of "Not Fade Away," however, is significantly more complex. Those are few and far between, but he noted that "things are freer, and there is more experimentation, in pop music song titles."Įven when a song title is not a constituent, we still expect the string of words to appear somewhere in the song itself as part of a syntactically well-formed lyrical sequence. Geoff focused mainly on book titles that are not syntactic constituents, like A Scanner Darkly or Sometimes a Great Notion.
SONG BUDDY HOLLY OH BOY PLUS
"Not Fade Away" consists of the adverb of negation not plus the verb-particle construction fade away, and as such it is an example of a non-constituent title of the type documented by Geoff Pullum here and here. As a postscript, one of those four song titles has an extra syntactic wrinkle that's worth mulling over. As you might have guessed, the four songs are "Oh Boy," "That'll Be the Day," "Rave On," and "Not Fade Away." You can check out the column here.
Today's the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, and I've commemorated the event in a Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus by considering lyrics from four of his most famous songs.
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