Simple pleasures. For the Monty Python crowd
I found it.
Sometimes there is a place for the silly songs. The fun things without hurt. Not humor, but joy. Maybe the majesty of a full-blown cloud-framed sunset, the quiet wonder of the world and sky at dawn. Or a nonsense ditty like the Llama song. Llamas are camelids (related to the camel family of mammals), but are not camels. In some ways they are raised in South America, and increasingly around the world, similarly to sheep, for their wool and meat. In many parts the llama is used as a beast of burden, to ride or carry goods like a donkey, and also as a guard animal to protect cow and sheep herds from predators.
For those that haven’t enjoyed The Llama Song, this is a Flash presentation with semi-synthesized voice singing the lyric, which are printed below picture. Someone like a children’s book, only the lyrics look more like they were written by one of those random-word chunks so popular with SPAM emails.
“Llama, Llama, Cheesecake, Llama” and “I was once a treehouse, I lived in a cake, but I never saw the way, The Orange slayed the Rake.” Simple tune, minimal percussion and organ accompaniment. We assume the song is played to perfection — it repeats identically over and over. Really. I listened longer than15 minutes, and didn’t hear any variations.
This isn’t my first exposure to silly songs on the Internet. For the diehard Wisconsin fan, or anyone that likes a fun song with silly graphics: Badger, Badger, Badger. “Mushroom, Mushroom!” to you, too.
Listening to Dr. Demento’s radio program some years ago, I occasionally caught the ‘One Hen, Two Ducks’ song. I remember listening to the tape over and over, trying to master the lyrics. Now it turns out that this counting song (One hen, two ducks, three squawking geese..) is posted on the girl scouts web site, as well as other places. The version the good Dr. Demento played reeled me in with the dramatic ‘Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array’ line. What may be an original version, or quite close, is posted on the Jerry Lewis Comedy web site. This tongue twister was used to test applicants for radio announcer jobs at Radio City in New York. In 1941 one of the applicants (that got the job) passed the words on to Jerry Lewis. Jerry used the sequence as a tongue twister in his comedy routines. I still like the deep, dramatic sweep of ‘Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array’. I really like that line. The recording I heard used the words more as listed at the Wikipedia entry, with the addition to the last line of ‘very same time’ at the end.
One more mention of a favorite ‘different’ tune. This is actually spoken poetry. Shel Silverstein is the only one I ever heard record ‘Sahra Cynthia Sylvia Stout, Would Not Take the Garbage Out’. From ‘The End of the Sidewalk’, this cautionary children’s fable .. uh, glories in the debris in the garbage can. Entertaining. Shel Silverstein was a talented performer, somewhat out on the edge.