My name is Ted, I'm 44, and I produce commercials for a group of local radio stations in a medium-sized market you've driven through. Which means that for eighteen years I have been the guy who makes the 30-second spot for the furniture store, the car dealer, the carpet outlet and the bank. And when the car dealer says, "Can we get a little song in there? Something catchy?", I am the guy who gets him a little song.

I am, in other words, part of the problem. The reason you are humming the name of a mattress store at 3 a.m. is people like me. I'm sorry. I'm also not sorry, because the jingle is, honestly, one of the great American folk art forms, and it is disappearing, and somebody ought to say a kind word for it before it's gone. So here I am. Turn your radio down and read.

A jingle is a piece of music engineered to do one thing: make you remember a name. Not like a name. Not buy a product, even. Just remember. And it does it with three tools that human beings have used to remember things since before writing.

The technical term for the thing you get stuck in your head is, I'm told, an "earworm," from the German. I just call it Tuesday.

The 1920s: it starts on the radio. Radio advertising was barely legal, or at least barely polite, in the mid-1920s; stations weren't sure listeners would stand for it. The commonly told story is that the first singing commercial was for a breakfast cereal, sung by a barbershop-style quartet on a Minneapolis station on Christmas Eve, 1926, and that the cereal's sales went up so much in the cities where it aired that the company, which had been thinking about dropping the brand, kept it. Whether every detail of that story is true, it's the one every jingle writer tells, and the cereal is still on the shelf.

The 1930s and 40s: the network years. Radio went national, and so did the singing commercial. The big soap and cigarette and cereal accounts had house orchestras and vocal groups, and the jingles were full little songs, often sixty seconds or more, with verses. A lot of the great ones from this era were written by Tin Pan Alley songwriters moonlighting. A banana company's calypso song from the mid-1940s, which taught America how to ripen a banana, was reportedly played hundreds of times a day on stations across the country. They were songs. People requested them.

The 1950s and 60s: the golden age. Television arrived, and the jingle went with it, and this is the era everybody my age has stuck in their heads for life. The hot dog company's wiener song (1963, and they're still using it). The bald cleaning-product mascot's song. The cigarette jingles, before the ban. The cola wars in song. The gum that doubled your pleasure. Madison Avenue had entire music departments, and there were jingle houses in New York, Chicago and Dallas with full-time singers and arrangers doing three or four a day. The style was bright, brassy, big-band-into-pop, with a stack of harmonized voices that we still call "the jingle sound." If you hear four voices in tight harmony singing anything, you assume it's an ad. That's this era's doing.

The 1970s and 80s: still strong, getting slicker. The 1971 hilltop soft-drink song (the one about buying the world one) was so popular it was re-recorded as a pop single and charted. The fast-food chain that said you deserved a break (1971). The antacid that went plop and fizz. The cat food where the cats sing. The bandage that stuck on you. The toy store where you didn't want to grow up (1982). The coffee that was the best part of waking up (1984). The candy bar that gave you a break (1986). I could go on all day, and at the station, I do. By now the jingles sounded like the pop of the moment: disco, then synthesizers, then power ballads. But they were still written for the product.

The 1990s: the decline. Here's where I get grumpy. Somewhere in the late 1980s the big agencies figured out that instead of writing a song about the product, they could license a song you already loved and glue the product to it. A sneaker company used a Beatles record in 1987 and everyone gasped, and then everyone did it. In 1995 a software company launched its new operating system with a Rolling Stones song, and paid a fortune for it, and after that a jingle looked downright cheap. Today the big national spots use a licensed hit, or a moody instrumental, or nothing, just a voice and a logo. The music departments closed. The jingle houses got smaller. The tight-harmony sound became a joke you'd use in a parody.

But! The jingle didn't die. It went local. Which brings me to my part of the story.

The national brands may have given up on the jingle, but the guy with three furniture stores has not, because a jingle is the cheapest way there is to make his name stick in a market where nobody's ever heard of him. Here's how it goes when the car dealer asks me for "a little song."

1. The meeting. I sit down with the client and get the three things a jingle has to carry: the name (said exactly the way he says it, which is a bigger deal than you'd think; is it "Bob Miller Ford" or "Bob Miller's"?), the one idea ("we're the friendly one," "we're the cheap one," "we've been here since 1952"), and the phone number or the location. That's it. If he gives me a fourth thing, I nod and leave it out.
2. The writer. Sometimes that's me with a guitar in the production room. For a bigger client I call one of the jingle houses; there are still good ones in Dallas, Nashville and a few other places that do nothing but this, and they'll sell you a "package": a full jingle, cut down to a :60, a :30, a :10 and a tag, in a couple of musical styles, with a "donut" version. A donut is a jingle with a hole in the middle: sung open, instrumental bed in the middle where the announcer reads the sale copy, sung close. The donut is the workhorse of local radio. One donut, fifty-two weeks of sales.
3. The demo. The writer sends a rough version on a cassette (lately a CD) with a scratch vocal and a piano or a synthesizer. The client listens to it in his office with the door closed. Then he plays it for his wife. Then his wife's opinion comes back to me. This is the most dangerous step in the process. I have had a perfectly good jingle killed because it reminded the client's wife of a song from her prom.
4. The session. Approved, the jingle house books real singers, usually two to four, and lays down the track. If I'm doing it in-house, I've got a couple of local singers I use, one of whom is the choir director at the Methodist church and has the best jingle voice in three counties. Session singers are astonishing: they'll sing a name they've never seen, in perfect harmony, in one take, and then do it again "a little more smiley" because the client's wife asked.
5. The cut. Back in my production room, I get the mix on DAT or CD, load it into the workstation, and build the actual commercial: sung open, the announcer (usually one of our on-air people, for a little extra) reading the copy over the bed, sung close, everything squeezed to exactly 30.0 seconds because 30.5 is a firing offense. It goes on a cart or into the automation and it's on the air by Monday. Then it's on the air every Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, for the next five years, because it works and he's not paying for a new one.

Cost? A package from a good jingle house can run a few thousand dollars, which for a car dealer is a rounding error on his monthly ad budget. An in-house "little song" from me and the choir director is a good deal less than that. Either way it's the best money he spends all year, and I say that as a man who will hear it eleven thousand times.

In July I asked readers to e-mail me the jingle that most makes them want to drive into a ditch, and I've been tallying the votes on a legal pad. 214 ballots as of this week. Here are the standings. (Product names only; I'm not printing lyrics here, partly because they belong to somebody and partly because I'm not doing that to you.)

Notice that most of the top eight are twenty years old or more. That's not because old jingles are worse. It's because they worked. Annoying and unforgettable are the same thing wearing different hats. Vote by e-mail (below). I'll update this in October.

Not the most annoying. The best. Craftsmanship. If you write jingles for a living, these are the ones you study.

• The Oscar Mayer wiener song (1963). Perfect. A melody a five-year-old can carry, the product name twice, and a joke. Thirty-six years old and still on the air. Nobody will ever do it better, and the same company then went and did the bologna one, which is nearly as good.
• The Chiquita Banana song (1944). A calypso that taught a nation a fact (don't put bananas in the refrigerator) and made it fun. Educational jingle before that was a thing.
• The hilltop soft-drink song (1971). The one that became a pop hit. Proof that a jingle can be a real song, and the beginning of the end, because after that everyone wanted a real song instead of a jingle.
• The coffee that's the best part of waking up (1984). A four-bar melody. That's it. Four bars, and it sells a feeling, not a bean. My favorite of the modern ones.
• Any local phone-number jingle that's outlived its store. There's one in my market for a tire dealer that closed in 1991 and people still sing it. That's immortality, folks. That's the whole business.