Jingles into Singles

I was raised on country sunshine, I am happy with the simple things.

Millions of TV viewers would recognize this bouncy ballad, sung in the buttercup-bright tones of Nashville's Dottie West, as the music for the current Coca-Cola commercial. A month ago, with a few alterations in the lyric, it also was released as Dottie West's latest RCA recording. As such, it is a sign of a growing trend in the country music field to convert jingles into singles. Country music is not only becoming unabashedly commercial, as purists frequently complain; now commercials are becoming country music.

The song from the Miller beer commercial, If You've Got the Time, has been adapted as a single by Red Steagall. Sammi Smith has recorded the Bell System's Call Me. Inspired by the Mazda car commercial, the Hummers have done Old Betsy Goes Boing, Boing.

Much of the credit, if that is the word, for the trend belongs to Songwriter Billy Davis, 38, a former singer (The Four Tops) and record executive (Chess Records) who is now a vice president and music director of Manhattan's McCann-Erickson advertising agency. Davis collaborated on the 1971 Coca-Cola commercial, which as a single, I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, sold over a million records. He and Dottie West wrote the current Coca-Cola hit, and he and McCann-Erickson Creative Director William Backer wrote the lyrics for the Miller beer single. There is some talk of dusting off Paint the World a Rainbow, the recent Coca-Cola radio jingle he produced, as a pop entry by the Spinners.

Meanwhile, advertisers are finding that such conversions can work two ways. Country Composer Tom T. Hall's Me and Jesus has recently been revised as a sales promotion song for a chemical weed preventive. The title: Me and Treflan.

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