In one of yesterday’s comments, Clyde mentioned taking a brisk morning walk in Mesa, Arizona while listening to this song by Peter Mayer.

Peter is a wonderful guy and this is a great song for many cosmic reasons. But one of the more cosmetically attractive things about it is that the music unfolds at a pace that is just right for walking. Same thing here, though a little faster, from Fats Domino.

The right music at a perfect pace can make a walk more pleasant, though caution is always advisable. There has been a recent flurry of attention devoted to the developing hazard of walking while fiddling with electronic gadgets, amplified by a viral YouTube video of a Pennsylvania woman tumbling into a shopping mall fountain because she was walking while texting. Inattention can have serious consequences, and it’s not a new problem. These NPR stories about distracted pedestrians are two years old.

Back to walking and listening to music – we’ve been doing this since the invention of the transistor radio, though at least in the pre-Sony Walkman days you didn’t have the immersive experience of headphones to seal off the outside world – just a single earplug to deliver the music. Or else you turned it up all the way and had the sound blasting out of the radio’s tinny little speaker through the tiny holes in its leatherette case.

And before that? We had to play the music back in our minds. Or, heaven forbid, sing it to ourselves! That’s the kind of strange behavior that caused our fellow pedestrians to cross to the other side of the street (after looking both ways, of course).

What’s your favorite walking music?