LIFE OF A SONG – ‘The Magic Number’ – Financial Times, June 2025
It’s highly likely that when you think back to your schooldays, you can barely remember a scrap of the vital knowledge that once kept you up all night revising, but have no trouble recalling every word of a random pop single that was occasionally on the radio during the same period. Such is the power of music, its stickiness being what inspired advertising executive David McCall to commission LA-based jazz musician Bob Dorough to write a song that could teach the three-times table.
This was 1971, and singer and pianist Dorough’s pedigree was impeccable. He had provided smooth vocals on two Miles Davis songs, performed between Lenny Bruce’s comedy sets, and composed the arrangements for beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s musical version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. He also had a reputation as a man who could make a song out of anything. He had appeared in a Budweiser beer advert, singing the text on the label, and had written a song inspired by the tag on a mattress. McCall had noticed that his son couldn’t grasp multiplication but had memorised the lyrics to every Rolling Stones song, and started casting around for someone who could give the number sequences some musicality.
Dorough’s colourful imagination, friendly, hippyish voice and way with a melody made him perfect for children’s music. “Three is a Magic Number” must be the prettiest, grooviest song ever written about multiplication tables.
McCall’s company pitched the idea for education through song to the president of children’s television at ABC. Dorough’s song acquired an animated cartoon and was expanded to become part of the Saturday morning TV diet of US children of the Seventies, under the title Schoolhouse Rock! He added more numerary compositions including “The Four-legged Zoo” and “Naughty Number Nine”, and joined a team writing dozens more songs to teach grammar, history and science.
By the late Eighties, Dorough’s educational optimism was a perfect fit for a clever new hip hop trio from Long Island, New York. Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer and Vincent “Maseo” Mason had met in the classroom at Amityville Memorial high school and become De La Soul. At the time, rap was prominently represented by the political fury of Public Enemy, the ladykilling swagger of LL Cool J and the gangsta nihilism of NWA. De La Soul’s debut album, 3 Feet High and Rising, had a cover featuring cartoon lettering and a sunny yellow background. The lyrics within mentioned alphabet soup, “doo doo in your pocket” and a crocodile with daisies in his hat. It was a new kind of flower power, hip hop that was funny, geeky and suburban next to the big city braggadocio of their peers. Trugoy’s stage name was not a tough guy street alias, but the word “yoghurt” backwards.
This unique outlook extended to the source material. While the funk deities James Brown and George Clinton were usually the first ports of call for hip hop sample hunters, across 3 Feet High and Rising were around 70 samples that ranged from Hall & Oates and Steely Dan to Otis Redding and Billy Joel. “The Magic Number” alone, as well as featuring Dorough’s jaunty bassline and chorus, lifted its thumping breakbeat from Led Zeppelin’s “The Crunge”, had soul singer Syl Johnson advising listeners to “Do the shing-a-ling” and Johnny Cash asking: “How high’s the water, Mama?” from his song “Five Feet High and Rising”, which inspired the album’s title.
At a time when many are questioning whether AI can really create something new and worthwhile out of the creative work of others, De La Soul’s ingenious use of sampling is inspiring, but at least they had to pay for it. Unfortunately, due to the original contracts they signed, they ended up paying far more dearly than most. The agreements mentioned physical formats but hadn’t anticipated digital music, meaning that permissions to use all those samples had to be sought anew for downloads and streaming, and the band couldn’t agree terms with their former record label, Tommy Boy, to get it done.
It meant that De La Soul missed out on financial gain from fresh interest in their music when they appeared on the Gorillaz hit “Feel Good Inc.” in 2005, and again when “The Magic Number” played over the end credits of Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. Finally, in 2022, the publishing company Reservoir Media bought the Tommy Boy catalogue and licensing expert Deborah Mannis-Gardner spent a full year clearing De La Soul samples. Their music arrived on streaming services in February 2023, 34 years after their classic debut was released and just too late for Trugoy, who died two weeks earlier aged 54.
Before then, fans of the song had to settle for Jack Johnson renaming it “The 3 R’s” to teach children about recycling on his soundtrack to the film Curious George, or the rock bands Embrace and Blind Melon adding some energy to Bob Dorough’s original, or Dorough himself stretching it out to a jolly seven-minute singalong on his 2004 live album Sunday at Iridium. But no one gave it as much carefree joy as De La Soul. At last everyone has access to their particular magic.
