May this warm your heart with warm heat

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It’s happened to all of us.

You’ll be driving to work on Interstate 77 and that jingle for Charlotte-based heating and cooling company Morris-Jenkins comes on the radio. You know the one: “They’ll be warm heat at your house tonight.” (That’s the winter version. In the summer, “warm heat” is replaced with “cool air.”)

Anyway, you’re still humming it when you get to work, hopefully not loud enough for the poor dude in the cubicle next to you to get it stuck in his head, too.

In fact, you’re probably singing it to yourself right now thanks to this column. Please accept my sincere apologies.

I wanted to know more about the creative forces behind this infectious tune, this remarkably catchy commercial that is to the brain what athlete’s foot is to feet: hard to get rid of. So I called Glenn Nash, owner of GMN Advertising, the Charlotte-based company that helped create the jingle.

Nash founded his company in 1995. Before that, he was promotion manager for WCNC-TV.

Nash said the Morris-Jenkins commercials were born in 2001. Since then, multiple versions of the jingle have been created to the delight of Morris-Jenkins jingle junkies — say that three times fast — including bluegrass, gospel, mariachi and zydeco.

Nash told me the Morris-Jenkins jingle took only three weeks to produce, which he said is quick.

Auditions were held to find the person to sing the song. They settled on James Flynn, former announcer for the Hornets.

The music is based on “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” which Wikipedia taught me is a ragtime song composed in 1896 by Theodore August Metz with lyrics by Joe Hayden. Listen to it on YouTube and you’ll see the similarities.

Nash said they did a copyright search before recording the song, and it turned out that “Hot Time” was in the public domain, which means they didn’t have to pay anyone to use it.

As for the lyrics, Nash said Morris-Jenkins wrote them, and his company helped rewrite them.

“We were looking to have something memorable,” he said of the commercials that, in the winter version, feature a guy waking up in the middle of the night to find his heater busted. In the commercial, Morris-Jenkins comes to the rescue.

The best jingles, Nash said, tell a little story.

He said the reason there haven’t been as many jingles in the U.S. as in the past is they are expense to produce, although they seem to be making a comeback.

Nash said the Morris-Jenkins campaign is his company’s best known. It’s so popular, Morris-Jenkins customers ask the repair people to sing the jingle when they arrive at their home. I wonder if the company charges extra for that.

While I had Nash on the phone, I couldn’t resist asking about that “warm heat” part of the jingle. As an editor, that redundancy is hard on the ears.

Nash said it’s been a source of much feedback. In fact, teachers have called Morris-Jenkins to scold them for such a sentence construction. TV news announcers have also changed “warm heat” to something else, he said.

Despite all of those problems, “warm heat” is staying, Nash said.

“Warm is a word you would associate with comfort,” he said. “Two, it does catch you off guard because it is a little bit unusual word structure.”

Nash said there’s talk about making some changes to the ad campaign. A current version doesn’t feature the jingle prominently in the first 15 seconds. But even though the ads might be tweaked, fans of the jingle don’t need to worry.

“Even if we drop it for a while, it will probably come back again,” Nash said.

Editor Deon Roberts can be reached at [email protected].