You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie

Song parodist Allan Sherman cut his teeth on the Borscht Belt circuit in the summers of the 1950s. Although his day job was a television producer for the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman show I've Got a Secret, it was on the stage that he really shined. After years of developing his craft, he released the album My Son, The Folk Singer in 1962, which catapulted to gold. Over one million copies sold. Another album soon followed, My Son, The Celebrity. The parodies of public domain folk songs paid off in spades.

In 1963, Sherman released another LP, catering to a national audience, My Son, The Nut, which included the novelty hit "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah". "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" reached #2 on the charts for three weeks that summer.  Most Baby Boomers are familiar with the song about Camp Granada. Novelty songs were big in the 1960s."They're Coming to Take me Away, Ha-Haaa!", by Napoleon XIV comes to mind, or "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron", by The Royal Guardsman. "Lady Godiva" by Peter and Gordon was a big hit, too. 

This weekend I fired up YouTube on my Chromebook and played select songs from My Son, The Nut. Some are just audio clips and others are videos from performances on television shows. My favorite is "You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie". Unfortunately, there's no footage of Sherman performing the song, just a photo of the album cover and the audio. 

"You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie" runs a little over three minutes. The first minute of the recording sounds like a spoken word poem to give a little background - how Louie was the King of France in 1789 and whatnot. After the intro, the piano begins playing in a manner reminiscent of Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn". The first three stanzas go like this: 

You went the wrong way, Old King Louie
You made the population cry
'Cause all you did was sit and pet
With Marie Antoinette
In your place at Versailles

And now the country's gone kablooie
So we are giving you the air
That oughta teach you not to
Spend all your time fooling 'round at the Folies Bergere

If you had been a nicer king,
We wouldn't do a thing,
But you were bad, you must admit
We're gonna take you and the Queen
Down to the guillotine,
And shorten you a little bit

European history buffs know Louis the XVI only made it to age 38. Allan Sherman didn't fare much better dying in 1973 at the age of 48. When listening to the song, it occurred to me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.