This may have been the first jazz song I ever heard. If it’s even jazz. Perhaps it’s blues. Or something in between. It’s also the only song I’ve ever heard by Maria Muldaur.

It’s so Seventies – sultry, summery, sensual, sexy, but in a cool, restrained sort of way, transporting you instantly to somewhere in sunny southern California with an ocean breeze and the smell of bougainvillea. Which is odd for a song clearly set somewhere in the Middle East.

There are of course no oases or camels in American deserts like the Mojave or Saguaro for young lovers to enjoy an illicit rendevouz among the cacti. And, without getting too nerdy about it, you don’t get cacti in Middle Eastern deserts either.

So it’s an imaginary desert. A Californian desert transported in the mind to Egypt, perhaps, where Omar Sharif might be wooing Sophia Loren in a Bedouin tent beneah the stars. With his camel parked outside the flap.

It’s all a bit suggestive, in a cheeky and rather innocent Carry On sort of a way: “Let’s slip off to a sand dune, kick up a little dust” and “You won’t need no camel when I take you for a ride.” You half expect Kenneth Williams to pop up, wagging a finger in admonishment.

I remember Maria Muldaur being the archetypal hippie chick and here she is, with a flower in her hair, a tambourine in her hand and a song in her heart, written by David Nichtern, who plays acoustic guitar. The bass is played by a man called Freebo, which very much sets this in 1973, when it came out, and the beautifully restrained electric guitar solo is by Amos Garrett.

Maria Muldaur is Maria D’Amato, a New Yorker who was raised on country-and-western music before embracing RnB and rock’n’roll, and forming a high school girl group with the wonderful Sixties-girl-group name The Cashmeres before becoming enchanted by the early-Sixties folk scene around her home in Greenwich Village.

She also studied Appalachian fiddle in the South and embraced the blues, joining a jug band where she met her husband Geoff Muldaur in the late Sixties, going on to form a duo with him.

All those influences filter through to this wonderful song that slides and glides and floats through you and around you like the aforementioned ocean breeze – albeit one you won’t find in a desert, not even at the oasis at midnight.