Music of the Spheres

You don’t like like my peaches

Don’t you shake my tree

Stay out of my orchard

Let my peaches be. . . .

--Old blues verse

The fruit bin of popular music is overflowing with Banana Boat Songs and Orange Blossom Specials, Blueberry Hills and Strawberry Fields. But when it comes down to it, the humble peach holds its own, pit for pit and peel for peel, with its higher-profile peers.

The evidence is compiled in many sources, including “The Green Book of Songs by Subject,” the 4th edition of which lists 12 tunes beginning with “peach,” not to mention numerous others with the word elsewhere in the title. Cherry tallied 11, apple 10.

The chronological granddaddy on the list is “Peach Pickin’ Time Down in Georgia” by Jimmie Rodgers, the legendary father of country music. The 1932 recording bears the distinction of being the last Rodgers record released while he was still alive. (It’s been revived by Willie Nelson on Bob Dylan’s new tribute album to Rodgers.)

The music is a typical vehicle for the famous Rodgers yodel. Beyond that, it’s an odd blend of romanticized travelogue and good-natured self-pity.

When it’s peach pickin’ time in Georgia

Apple pickin’ time in Tennessee,

Cotton pickin’ time in Mississippi,

Everybody picks on me.

The process of procuring the peach also figures in Woody Guthrie’s classic “Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos),” but here it’s no moonlight stroll through the orchard.

“The crops are all in and the peaches are rottening,” begins the song, an account of an ill-fated group of migrant California farm workers expelled from the country after their labor is done.

But the peach is versatile enough to anchor an abstraction such as “Peaches en Regalia,” a prototype Frank Zappa instrumental piece. The friendly amalgam of jazz, schlock-pop, avant-garde and pseudo-Bach became enough of a Zappa signature to earn cheers of recognition when played as an encore on the Mothers’ “Fillmore East” live album.

Speaking of that ballroom, the album that followed the Allman Brothers’ “At Fillmore East” was “Eat a Peach,” the group’s last with guitarist Duane Allman. According to Allman’s biographer Scott Freeman, the 1972 LP was so titled not because Duane crashed his motorcycle into a peach tree (he didn’t), but for one of the guitarist’s throwaway interview lines: “Every time I’m in Georgia, I eat a peach for peace.”

And the peaches keep a-rollin’. Both the Ikettes and Wayne Shorter recorded songs called “Peaches & Cream.” Plain and simple, “Peach” is on two of Prince’s hits collections. “Peaches,” by the Presidents of the United States of America, was eaten up by Gen-X record buyers, and the same title appears on records by Captain Beefheart. There are songs called “Peaches” on records by Junior Parker, Kristen Hall, Nat King Cole and the Stranglers. Big Joe Williams (“Peach Orchard Mamma”) and Sonny Boy Williamson (“Peach Tree”) bring the fruit to the blues.

And in the affiliated field of recorded comedy, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s “Good Evening” contains the classic “The Frog and the Peach.” That’s the name of a restaurant whose proprietor (Cook) can’t comprehend his lack of business with a menu of just two dishes: frog a la pe^che (a whole frog stuffed with a peach) and pe^che a la frog (a peach stuffed with wriggling tadpoles).

Recipes welcome.