Our November 2014 cover star “Weird Al” Yankovic is just one in a long line of musical humorists. Here’s a little more about the parodists who influenced him.
In our November 2014 cover story on superstar song parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic, we made note of a few other comic artists of the mid-20th century who inspired him: Allan Sherman, Tom Lehrer, Spike Jones, and Stan Freberg. But we figured that just mentioning their names wasn’t really good enough—you should hear them too! And so we’ve included songs by all four in our November online streaming playlist, which you can access right here. Scroll down to find the songs at the bottom of the playlist; there are nine altogether, each one bearing the header “Song Parody.” In most cases, we decided to include both the parody and the original piece it’s based on (that way it’s easier to hear where the jokes are).
The following is a guide to the playlist tracks.
Dance of the Hours
Written in the 1870s by Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli, this piece originally accompanied a ballet sequence in his opera La Gioconda. But its popularity with audiences soon led to its being performed more frequently on its own. It gained further fame decades later when Walt Disney chose it to be one of the featured works in his 1940 animated film Fantasia.
Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah
Allan Sherman used Ponchielli’s music as the melodic base for this 1963 novelty hit. The lyrics take the form of a note from a disgruntled kid at summer camp to his parents; the note itself was fictional but based on an actual letter of complaint sent to Sherman by his son from a camp in upstate New York. “Hello Muddah” appeared on Sherman’s third album, My Son, the Nut, which was the last comedy collection to reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart until “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Mandatory Fun in 2014.
Clementine
A child prodigy in mathematics, Tom Lehrer entered Harvard at 15, worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and the National Security Agency, and went on to a long and distinguished professorial career at Harvard, MIT, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. On the side, he pursued a second, much more visible career as a musical satirist. For this track from the 1959 album More of Tom Lehrer, he deconstructs a traditional folk song by presenting it in several different styles.
Riders in the Sky (original)
This 1949 recording by Vaughn Monroe is only one of many covers of this song (which was written the previous year by Stan Jones), but it was the most successful version, hitting No. 1 on the charts.
Riders in the Sky (parody)
Shortly after Monroe’s recording was released, Spike Jones and his collaborators cut this bizarre takeoff. It originally ended with a quip from Jones about how rich Monroe was getting from sales of “Riders in the Sky” (Monroe was a major stockholder of RCA, the company that released his records), but that line was cut from later reissues.
Cry
Johnnie Ray was one of the first musical performers to be labeled a “teen idol,” and his dramatic vocal approach helped this song become a multiplatinum seller in 1952.
Try
The year after “Cry” came out, comedian Stan Freberg rewrote its words and took Ray’s singing style several hilarious steps further for this recording. Besides his work in comedy, Freberg was also a voice actor in animated films and TV, and a pioneer in the advertising world—for his use of satire (of course).
I Love Rock ‘n Roll
This catchy anthem will forever be associated with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ classic 1982 recording (the one heard here), but it was actually written seven years earlier by Alan Merrill and Jake Hooker for their band Arrows.
I Love Rocky Road
Always appreciative of a good tune, the young “Weird Al” Yankovic latched onto “I Love Rock ’n Roll” but, as usual, he made a few changes in his 1983 version of the song: The guitar riff became an accordion riff and the words were about his favorite ice cream flavor.