You’re listening to a brand new song, and yet, you feel like you’ve heard those words somewhere before. Or maybe you recognize familiar song titles popping out in an otherwise original song. Or, you’re simply listening, you like what you hear, and you don’t even realize that what you’re hearing is a song within a song.

Oldies are routinely filched for their riffs and melodic inspiration (in last month’s column the melody to Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” was linked to Del Shannon’s “Runaway”) though sometimes it’s a lyric or the song itself that inspires a whole new song (as in “Me and Del were singin’ little runaway,” from the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song “Runnin’ Down a Dream”).

Rock types are supposed to know exactly what’s meant by “little runaway,” just as we do when Bruce Springsteen calls out to “Roy Orbison singing for the lonely” in his own “Thunder Road.” In both Petty’s and Springsteen’s songs, the song within the song helps set the scene for the narrative to come. In Petty’s case a car ride on a sunny day after a long rain becomes an adventure: “Anything was possible.” In Springsteen’s classic, we take the leap that it’s Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” that enhances the narrator’s vision of Mary dancing “across the porch as the radio plays,” emboldening him to ask her on the trip of a lifetime. In both Petty’s and Springsteen’s songs it’s freedom the singer is seeking and a song on the radio is inspiring him to act in its name.

The earth-shaking impact rock ‘n’ roll radio had on Springsteen and Petty’s generation has been well-documented: These were the proverbial kids under the covers with their transistor radios, the teenagers who started bands in the wake of Elvis and the Beatles. By that time, songs shouting out to other songs had developed into a rock ‘n’ roll tradition: In “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry noted Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes”; Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” spawned “Peggy Sue Got Married”; and, in blues tradition, Bo Diddley trumpeted his own mythology in a song any time he got the chance. By the time songs like Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party”, with its celebration of dance hits like “Soul Twist” and “The Mashed Potatoes”, came around, calling out songs and other artists was common practice, especially during the fade-out.

In the 1966 hit “Land of a Thousand Dances”, Springsteen hero Wilson Pickett shouts out to “Bony Maronie” as well as to Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” The following year, Arthur Conley’s “Sweet Soul Music” put a “spotlight on Wilson Pickett… singing ‘Mustang Sally.’” Otis Redding, Low Rawls, James Brown, and Sam and Dave all got a name-check in Conley’s song while reference was also made to Jackie Wilson’s “Baby Workout” (”out here on the floor”) and Smokey Robinson’s “Going to a Go Go.” A decade later Patti Smith paraphrased Pickett when she asked, “Do you know how to pony like Bony Maronie?” in her own “Land/Horses.”

A good question at this point might be who is this Bony Maronie, anyway? Because here she comes again, turning up with “Short Fat Fanny” and “Long Tall Sally” in the Easybeats’ tribute to rock ‘n’ roll, “(Gonna Have a) Good Time.” Maronie, Fanny, and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” were the creations of early rock ‘n’ roller Larry Williams, whose songs were frequently covered by the Beatles. But the shout-out business is hardly exclusive to the songs of old time rock ‘n’ roll, the kind Bob Seger used to sing about…

After the Beatles got psychedelicized, they looked back at their own “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus” through a “Glass Onion.” And the entire ’70s were a giant bonus round for songs within songs: “Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter… Eight Miles High and falling fast… Did you write ‘The Book of Love’…” Surely you recognize these lyrics, which employ song titles, from Don McLean’s “American Pie (Pts 1 & 2)”, the uber song about songs that lived on the charts throughout the early part of 1972 and kicked off a craze of limp chart hits referring to other songs.

Rick Nelson said hello to the Everly Brothers’ creation “Marylou” at his “Garden Party” (at which “Johnny B. Goode” was also a guest). “Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)” by one-hit-wonders Reunion has lyrics almost wholly comprised of artist names, pop culture references, and song titles (”Gimme Shelter”, “Satisfaction”, “Sugar, Sugar”). “Summertime Blues” and “Blue Suede Shoes” cropped up in David Essex’s cosmic trip, “Rock On.”