Half-century old reel-to-reel tapes stored in an East Coast basement recently surfaced, and they held three lost Allan Sherman parodies. I was tempted to say they are legendary, but they are too obscure for that. Nobody knew of them, and so no legends could be promulgated.
Two of the songs parody tunes from Porgy and Bess. They [...]
The Basement Tapes — Allan Sherman version
Allan Sherman gets a nod from the Times
Which made this article about him in the Forward even more timely than when I first thought of it.
Thanks, guys.
Allan Sherman’s judaizing impulse—the case of David Susskind
It’s a seeming throwaway on Allan Sherman’s first album, My Son, The Folk Singer,
Little David Susskind, shut up
Please don’t talk, please don’t talk
Little David Susskind, eat first
Then you’ll talk
David Susskind came to public fame in the late 1950s with the talk show Open End, which sometimes ran for hours. It had no predetermined time slot. [...]
Allan Sherman’s family lived as non-Jewish Jews among Jews
When Sherman began 8th grade in Los Angeles in the fall of 1936, his mother Rose had recently been married — for the fourth and last time — to a Jewish conman and gangster. I have his FBI file. It’s big. (Mostly he liked to burn down businesses, usually his own. But the file suggests [...]
continue reading >>Allan Sherman didn’t attend 21 schools (but he early had a way with words)
One of the tidbits that Allan Sherman fans have heard is that he attended 21 schools before college. The figure comes from his entertaining but not wholly reliable autobiography, A Gift of Laughter.
Well, that’s not right.
For my biography of Sherman I have done some prodigious digging, and as I gathered information I became embarrassed that [...]
It was ‘Jewish or Bust’ for Allan Sherman
In my post yesterday I wrote that Allan Sherman’s first Jewish song parody invoked Humpty Dumpty partly because his parents, Rose and Percy Copelon, filed for divorce in June 1932, when Sherman was seven.
That’s enough to make any kid feel that no one could put his pieces together again.
But how to explain Humpty Dumpty happily [...]
Allan Sherman news: His very first Jewish song parody
Allan Sherman news? How can there be Allan Sherman news? The guy has been dead for almost 37 years.
There can be news because I’ve been researching his life for a biography, and I’ve interviewed dozens of his friends and family and obtained a great deal of original material and recordings from archives and individuals.
Incredibly, considering [...]
Why Allan Sherman is not cool among hip younger Jews — an early diagnosis
The sociologist Herbert J. Gans, recently retired from Columbia University, wrote one of the very few thoughtful articles about Allan Sherman.
In “Alan (sic) Sherman’s Sociologist Presents…,” published in The Reconstructionist on May 3, 1963, Gans was intrigued by the Broadway show tune parodies Sherman performed at concerts (copyright holders did not allow Sherman to record [...]
Allan Sherman’s Hello Muddah lyrics
The lyrics to Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah”
Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh,
Here I am at Camp Granada.
Camp is very entertaining,
And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining.
I went hiking with Joe Spivey.
He developed poison ivy.
You remember Leonard Skinner.
He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner.
All the counselors hate the waiters,
And the lake has alligators.
And [...]
