Jeopardy! mega-champ Ken Jennings, who has his own blog partly in support of his upcoming book Brainiac, today wonders about a certain genre of song:

And I wondered: what's the greatest song in history that shares its name with a U.S. state? "California" and "Nebraska" are two pretty solid nominees. But what about the dull earnestness of CSN&Y's "Ohio"? Or the simple fun of the Beach Boys' "Hawaii"? Or Sonic Youth's unlikely Aerosmith tribute, "New Hampshire"? Should I salute or ignore the pre-Sufjan efforts of acts like the Dambuilders and They Might Be Giants' John Linnell to write songs about whole swaths of the Union?

I was at the point of putting the tiara on Arrested Development's irresistible "Tennessee," but then I remembered the sugary, strings-drenched pop bliss of the early Bee Gees hit "Massachusetts." Hard to beat that.

Maybe - unless you're talking about a song written by Rodgers & Hammerstein, part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical that became an Oscar®-winning movie, and is the only state song that, according to one expert, "everyone in the world knows the words to."

Then again, the Mormon boy is probably trying to establish some street cred by only mentioning iPod-cool songs. Oklahoma! is the only state song to meet his specific criteria, but if you expand it to songs that start with a state name, you also have to include classics like California, Here I Come, Maryland, My Maryland, Tennessee Waltz, and perhaps best of all, Georgia On My Mind.

Hoagy Carmichael could give Rodgers & Hammerstein a run for their money. The Bee Gees? I think not.