S
ummer is the season for silliness (and,
evidently, alliteration). There is no greater place to discover
purebred, 100% silliness than in novelty tunes (witness the recent
welcome re-emergence of the one gent who singlehandedly has been
keeping the genre alive, Weird Al). In this post I want to spotlight
one piece of sheer ridiculousness and its connection to the world of
“nonsense songs.”
Reportedly it was comic actor Del Moore
who told Jerry Lewis about “the announcer's test,” a
tongue-twisting, laundry-list recitation that was used at NBC to
audition prospective radio performers. Lewis has been doing it now
for more than half a century; I remember reading that at one point he
recited it every night one week while guest-hosting The
Tonight Show (I believe in the early Sixties).
The Wikipedia entry for “the
announcer's test” indicates that Moore took the test in 1941 – at
that point Jerry was a young comedian doing a record-miming act, so I
doubt he stopped the records to do this crazy recitation. In any
case, Jerry became identified with the piece, which starts off “One
hen/one hen, two ducks/one hen, two ducks, three squawking geese...”
One has to wonder how many times Jerry
rehearsed that, knowing his perfectionist, control-freak tendencies.
The most curious entry in the recitation, concerning “Don Alverso's
tweezers” (the name is also spelled “Alverzo”) is explained in
one of the many books about Lewis, but I am damned if I can remember
which book and who Alverso was – if you are in possession of such
knowledge, leave it in the comments field.
People who are not Jerry fans (and I
know you're out there, I can hear you audibly loathing him) might be
familiar with this recitation as a silly memory test taught at scout
camp or in school. I for one am always brought in mind of the
“Sanzini Brothers,” the alter-egos of Flo and Eddie, who were the
alter-egos of Mark Volman and Funhouse guest Howard Kaylan of
the Turtles (seen right with some friends).
Howard and Mark did the announcer's
test in their act as “the Tibetan Memory Trick” and included a
live recording of it on their 1975 album Illegal, Immoral
and Fattening.
I was unaware of the test's existence
as a pop-rock single from 1962 – for this, I thank correspondent
and “high”/“low” cultural connoisseur RC. The single was called “One Hen,” and it was performed by a group of studio singers named “the
Blue Chips” for this project.
The men behind the single were Hugo &
Luigi, two Italian-American cousins who worked in the music industry
as writers, producers, and record label owners from the Fifties
through the Seventies. Their careers included work with Sarah
Vaughan, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis, Sam Cooke, and Isley Brothers. One of
their final hits was “The Hustle”
by Van McCoy in 1975.
In the meantime, they had a little
habit at one point of taking foreign melodies and writing new lyrics
(with co-writer George Weiss) without ever acknowledging the source
for the melody. It's not known if they did this a lot, but there were
two very big hits that were examples of this tendency: The Tokens'
“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (from the South African musician
Solomon Linda's song “Mbube,” better known over here thanks to
Pete Seeger and the Weavers as “Wimoweh”) and Elvis's “Can't
Help Falling in Love with You” (based on “Plaisr d'Amour” by
Jean-Paul Egide Martini).
In this case there was no stated writer
of the announcer's test, and they had to come up with the melody
themselves (and it ain't much of a melody, just snippets of other
tunes). It's quite a little ditty and it became the theme for radio
personality Dick Summer (who I know and loved from his later days at
WNBC and WYNY here in NYC) when he was on at nights on the Boston
radio station WBZ. He called this crazy thing “The Nightlighter's Password.”
“One
Hen” is simultaneously really catchy, very dopey, and kinda
aggravating if you get it stuck in your cranium. After hearing it, I
was brought in mind of the early nonsense songs that no doubt spawned
it – tunes that were big hits that were also, by turns, catchy,
dopey, and kinda aggravating.
Thus, I present a small handful of
these suckers, since the subject of novelty tunes and nonsense songs
is very wide, very broad, and most certainly deserves its own blog
(it has its own podcast, on which more below; I'm sure there
already is a novelty records blog – if so, lemme know in the
comments field below).
These songs have existed since
recording began, but they seemed to become super-popular with the
advent of the big band era. In 1939, Kay Kyser had a major hit with
“Three Little Fishes” (with its refrain “Boop boop dit-tem
dat-tem what-tem chu!” – in looking that up, I got to see at
least four distinct ways of spelling this nonsense).
The one that broke new ground by
explaining its insanity was, of course, “Mairzy Doats,” the 1944
hit by the Merry Macs. The song is truly catchy as fuck, but like a
lot of really good whodunits, it loses much of its allure once
you've heard the “solution” (which one of the songwriters said
came from his daughter's mispronunciation of something she learned in
school), there's not much more to absorb.
Still, the song provides a great
defense when the argument is put forth that all the music the
“greatest generation” listened to was on the order of Gershwin,
Porter, and Kern:
In the Fifties, nonsense songs exploded
in the period before rock 'n' roll took hold of the mainstream. This
kind of music regularly charted, was performed by name artists, and
became its own subgenre throughout the Fifties, Sixties, and
Seventies. The forefather of the whole (WWII and after) thing is of
course the god Spike Jones (not Jonze), who begat all the later great
weirdo acts, from Tom Lehrer to Zappa with all the stops in between.
Spike requires his own blog post, and more than likely his own
fan-appreciation blog....
You can blame the emergence of a steady
output of novelty 45s on the supposedly super-wholesome and anodyne
nature of Fifties culture (a concept that is disproved when one
actually digs into Fifties culture), or perhaps because there were
more producers like Mitch Miller who put novelties in the
mainstream with “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” and
“Mule Train” (with its whipcrack); I prefer to nostalgize about
the record Sinatra considered his worst, “Mama Will Bark.”
In the early Fifties, the nonsense
songs weren't as nonsensical. In fact some were was downright
educational, like the Four Lads' “Istanbul (not Constantinople)”
(which most likely spawned Soupy's awesome “Pachalfaka”). Younger
listeners recall the 1990 cover of the song by They Might Be Giants,
a band that has ventured into novelty-tune waters (and later kiddie
music) at various points in their long career (the duo also has a
penchant for writing earworm compositions whose lyrics cannot be
dissected).
I was taught this ditty by my mother as
a small child. She never embraced rock 'n' roll heavily in the
Fifties, but she did fall victim to the occasional novelty ditty:
I could go on and on about novelty
records, but won't (right now). I will, though, point you to an act
that followed in the tradition I've been talking about, the vocal
combo known as the Gaylords. They were a trio of Italian-Americans
(do you sense a trend here? Another post could handle Lou Monte and
nonsense deity Louis Prima!) doing songs like “The Little Shoe Maker” and “Ma-Ma-Ma-Marie.”
But the earworms, man, the earworms...
When the group performed in a distinctly non-Italian mode, they sang
catchy Fifties tunes like this impossible-to-forget paean to a
Chinese restaurant (which apparently has gotten a second life to a
Mafia video game):
KBC – he of the Bitslap podcast
– provided my intro to the music of the Gaylords. In one show he
did a looooong time ago, KBC not only played “No More Chow Mein,”
but the ditty below, “Papa Poppadopolis, the Happy Locksmith Man.”
There is an incredible innocence at work here (the kind that was gone
around the time of another song about a profession, Meri Wilson's “Telephone Man” – yes, the novelty-record trove goes
deep, it goes verrrrry deep....).
And because this must end somewhere, I
punctuate this discussion with a novelty/nonsense song that does
actually hurt my head. It's sung by the calmest man in music, Perry
Como, and is a carefully crafted tune that has a little “secret”
to it... well, you'll figure it out in a line or two and you'll
scream for mercy. This discussion of nonsense in music will be
resumed at some point in the future.
Thanks to RC for the original
“discussion” about “One Hen.” My thanks also go to the
intrepid KBC, who continues to do excellent work on his weekly “Bitslap” podcast. He's currently on a short summer layoff, but
has left us several years worth of old episodes and promises to be
back in September!
