From the Jolly Switzer to Dark Spirits and savagery

Doing an image search for "The Jolly Switzer" led me to a 1967 Canadian book called This Is Music. (Note, if you have to explain that that's what it is, that's usually not a good sign.) It has sheet music for the song, with a note immediately below it explaining that there is "no black key between E and F" on a piano.

The mention of black keys caught my eye because in a comment on "American brownshoe" (April 25), which reports a dream about a gray Plymouth Voyager van, Bill brings up a group called The Black Keys whose 2011 album El Camino has on the cover not the Chevy El Camino you might expect but rather a gray Plymouth Grand Voyager.

This minor sync was enough to make me dwell on the idea of "black keys" enough to make a random connection: There are 36 black keys on a standard piano, and the 14th-century grimoire known as The Key of Solomon includes a chapter called (in MacGregor Mathers's English translation) "The 36 Dark Spirits of Solomon" -- a list deriving from the 2nd-century Testament of Solomon, with each Dark Spirit corresponding to one of the decans of the zodiac. I've never actually read any of that stuff; it's just one of those factoids one picks up. (Actually, I had misremembered it as being the "36 Dark Keys of Solomon," which would have been even better, but a Google search set me straight.)

When I ran a Google search for jolly switzer (no quotation marks), most of the top hits were for hymn sites due to the fact that the song, though not remotely religious in nature, was included in official children's songbooks published by the LDS Church. The second result, though, was something completely unexpected: the Wikipedia page for the novel The Lord of the Flies. That was an intriguing sync, since Bill just brought up The Lord of the Flies two days ago, in a comment on "Jupiter, star of chaos."

What possible connection could there be between the gay tra-la-la with his fa-la-la-la and Golding's schoolboy savagery? None. The article quotes a reference in the novel to a "jolly good show," and it quotes a review by a critic named Charles Switzer. The review was published on May 5, 2025. Having just looked up the writer Bret Harte, to whom the lyrics of "The Jolly Switzer" are credited, I recognized that date as the 123rd anniversary of Harte's death.

Switzer's review of The Lord of the Flies is divided into five sections, the first of which bears the heading "Golding's Island Despises Order and Chaos in Equal Measure." The post on which Bill left his Lord of the Flies comment was, again, called "Jupiter, star of chaos," and it cites Arrowsmith's post "Syn-crow-nicity: Order out of Chaos."