I was six years old in 1962 — too young to do my own record shopping. This meant I was at the mercy of what Mom and Dad deemed fit to play on the Victrola in the living room. Looking back, it could have been worse. At the mercy of my parents' tastes, I was exposed to show tunes, pop vocalists, and an odd fat guy who sang songs which sounded funny, even if I wasn’t always sure what he was singing about. His performances were captured in front of a live audience. He would sing and they would laugh.
His name was Allan Sherman, and his success story surprised a lot of people back then. Remember, this was pre-British Invasion days when the charts were filled with pop stars, crooners, and original cast albums (the bestselling record of that year was the West Side Story film soundtrack).
In the 1950s, Sherman had recorded a few Borscht Belt parodies for Jubilee Records, then went on to work in the shiny new world of television. After he had been fired as producer of The Steve Allen Show and I've Got a Secret, a game show he co-created, he decided to take up where he left off and went back to being a song parodist.
Weird Al Yankovic owes more than just a tip of his hat to Sherman. You could say he owes his career to this purveyor of wit and witticisms, whose songs were sung to the tunes of such classics as "Streets of Laredo" and "Alouette". Where Yankovic has been able to write his parodies using hit songs of the day (per the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law), Sherman was forced, early on (before the money started rolling in), to use songs in the public domain for fear of litigation.
In September, Collectors Choice Music released eight titles from the Allan Sherman catalogue. The four I sampled were recordings Sherman made early in his career and contain what is considered his ‘classic’ material.
His first record, My Son the Folk Singer was released in 1962 and was an unexpected smash, reaching the number one position on the Billboard charts. Recorded in Radio Recorders studio before an invited audience of one hundred Hollywood friends, luminaries and Warner Brothers executives, it was more a party record than your typical chart topper. Listeners really took to Sherman’s parodies. As reissue annotator Dr. Demento writes, “He had developed a style that somehow preserved the soul of Jewish humor but made it sound all-American.” Songs such as "Sarah Jackman" (“Frere Jacques”) and “Oh Boy” (“Chiapanecas”) were intelligent and witty, peppered with pop culture references and Jewish-isms. Sherman sang with an everyman charm. Relating to his humor was easy, even if you were unfamiliar with Jewish culture and had no idea who the heck the members of Hadassah (a shout-out in the song "My Zelda") were.
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