[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsgCzszkLS8]
A lot of people will be more familiar with the Johnny Cash version of this song, but Snow released it many years before Cash. Snow released the song in 1962, and it became a number one hit for him. Snow's version wasn't the original either. It was released earlier that year by Austrailian artist Lucky Starr. In his version, the places were all cities and towns in Australia. Starr released an EP entitled Lucky's Been Everywhere that had four versions. There was a version for Great Britain, USA, New Zealand, and Australia.
It takes a lot of focus and talent to get this song down as dead on target as these artists did, but it's also funny what music can help you learn and remember. Ray Charles wrote a song that helped my entire eighth grade class learn to list all fifty states in alphabetical order. After learning his composition, "The Fifty Nifty United States", my class was soon able to list all fifty in order, and spell them all correctly, without the aid of the melody. To this day, I can still recite them all the way from Alabama to Wyoming, and it's all because of a song. I imagine that the melody, as quick as it is in Snow's performance, allowed him to memorize this list of locales quicker than he could've any other way.
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