Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 24, Issue 3, Pages 325–332 “Deliver de Letter”: “Please Mr. Postman,” The Marvelettes, and the Afro-Caribbean Imaginary Gayle Wald George Washington University I am happy to be on a panel titled “Afro-Imaginaries,” since this article represents something of a flight of the imagination. It emerges from a random moment of listening, a moment last summer when I was hearing a familiar pop song again—for the twentieth time, or maybe the hundredth— and suddenly noticed something I had not heard before. The pleasures of pop music are underwritten by repetition; pop ingratiates itself through its familiarity. But as any serial listener knows, in the midst of automatic replay you can also be surprised by sound, suddenly attentive to resonances that previously escaped your recognition. The song I was listening to last summer is The Marvelettes’s 1961 breakout hit “Please Mr. Postman,” and the sounds that “surprised” me come near the end, when throaty-voiced lead singer Gladys Horton delivers what would become the song’s signature lyric. 1 Sing-along fodder for generations of listeners, Horton’s playful and lilting delivery of the line “Deliver de letter, the sooner de better” simultaneously evokes the linguistic inventiveness detailed by Kyra Gaunt in her book The Games Black Girls Play and the “West Indian” accents of the calypso craze of just a few years earlier, when Lena Horne “ventriloquized Jamaican patois” on Broadway, and when Harry Belafonte’s wildly popular “calypsos” threatened the hegemony of rock and roll. 2 Horton’s pronunciation and intonation of “Deliver de letter” would be copied by both The Beatles and The Carpenters in their 1963 and 1975 cover versions of “Please Mr. Postman.” The phrase even made it into the first line of Horton’s January 2011 obituary in The New York Times, as a “memorable” contribution to the American pop vernacular. 3 Google “Deliver de letter” today and you will find thousands of punning riffs on the song, including fond memories of tweenage kissing games that made the most of the lyrics’ gentle sexual innuendo (you had to go in the closet for the “delivery”). What imbues the phrase with sonic iconicity? Treated as C  2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.