30 Years Ago. Or 40 Years Ago? MacArthur Park "Someone left the cake out in the rain..."

When I was a little girl during the disco era, I heard the disco version of this song by Donna Summer. That was the ONLY version I knew. I didn't know that the song had already been recorded ten years earlier by Jimmy Webb. I was too young to understand what a metaphor or symbolism was, so when I heard Donna singing so tragically about someone leaving a cake out in the rain, I took it literally. 

I remember the visual in my childhood mind. I could see the cake sitting by someone's front porch wih rain pouring down on it and icing flowing off the cake and onto the grass. When she sang with such sadness about how she'd never have that recipe again, I felt so sorry for her that she worked so hard on baking this cake for someone, and I wondered why she left it outside at their home and they never picked it up, wasting a cake for which she no longer had the recipe. Tragic..... tragic.

Written by Jimmy Webb, the song was originally recorded in 1968 by Richard Harris (thank you to JADTUBE for uploading this to youtube so people who never got to hear the original version, like me, could finally hear it). There is an actual Mac Arthur Park in Los Angeles that this song is named after. I found while searching youtube for this song that many people still think this song is all about a cake that was left out in the rain. If that were true, this would be the first and only love song to a cake that I know of.