General Mills tends to lay the most vocal claim to the world’s first recorded jingle. A very successfully advertised American rat poison, Rough on Rats (which, to go by the number of accidental and non-accidental human deaths also attributed to it, was rough on pretty much anything) was marketed with the pre-recording equivalent of a single release: 35 cent sheet music for a rather grisly albeit chirpy ditty, copyrighted in 1882. It’s possible to point to their origins much further back in history, in the rhyming cries of street vendors throughout the 15th and 16th centuries – some of which, such as the nursery rhyme ‘Hot cross buns’ or the “Cockles and mussels” portion of ‘Molly Malone’, survive in popular song.Īs the idea of advertising evolved in the 1800s, so too did the use of ad music to bolster marketing efforts. Though in some ways it’s hard to imagine the advertising landscape before them, jingles as we think of them were only made possible by the advent of the radio after 1923.

Honda song buddy holly