"HUMPED HIM A B'AR WHEN HE WAS ONLY THREE": WERE THERE DIRTY LYRICS TO "THE BALLAD OF DAVY CROCKETT?"

Fess Parker, Davy Crockett himself, draws Old Betsy in outrage over his young fans' vile corruption of his iconic theme tune.

Now that Fess Parker, star of the classic 1950's DAVY CROCKETT teevee series and the later DANIEL BOONE, has died at the age of eighty-five, I have to ask the following question: is my memory faulty, or were there dirty lyrics to "The Ballad of Davy Crockett?"

An instant classic when first heard in 1954 in conjunction with the DISNEYLAND shows about the coonskin-capped frontiersman, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" became as ingrained into the American pop culture psyche in the same way that "Eye of the Tiger" did in the 1980's, so much so that kids who never even saw the Crockett show could sing it. I think my first exposure to it was as a single included with a shitload of "kiddie" 45's my folks gave me when I was about four years old, and the song appealed to me because it gave the story basics of a hero, all imparted with a catchy tune.

As often happens with songs of such ubiquity, I recall "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" having received the "Ribald Songbird" treatment, but I may be wrong about that. I vaguely remember hearing a filthed-up version of it on the playground before my family left California for Connecticut, so if I did indeed hear it, I heard it before I turned seven. I seem to remember lines like:

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
Didn't give a damn if he caught V.D.
Raised in the woods screwin' Cherokee
Humped him a b'ar when he was only three
(chorus) Davy, Davy Crockett
King of the wild Frontier!

And from there each verse escalated in smut-value, which comes as no surprise since the song fairly screams for a dirty interpretation. Why, the refrain of "king of the wild frontier" alone can be interpreted in many ways, including "takin' it in the rear," "takin' 'em in the rear" (obviously in reference to the Injuns he fought), or even "wearin' a black brassiere" (hey, being a frontiersman was a lonely path to walk). So with all that to jog the memory, does anyone remember any more dirty lyrics to this landmark of stirring 'Fifties pop patriotism? And if it doesn't actually exist, how about writing some? Send in your entry today!

THE RIBALD SONGBIRD STRIKES AGAIN!!!

In a scenario nearly identical to the last time I wrote about my habit of befouling innocent oldies, yesterday I had the TV on and there was another one of those half-hour Time-Warner oldies compilation ads, only this time under the title FLOWER POWER, featuring a compendium of — you guessed it! — songs encompassing the hippie era (which the packagers see as having occurred betwen 1967 and roughly 1973) as hosted by a Jurassic Peter Fonda and some unknown blonde who was swimming around in her daddy's balls when EASY RIDER came out.

As the songs began to stream into the air, complete with accompanying footage of mud-covered hippies with beards a-flyin' and no bras — that was just the guys — and the groups on various shows like OLD GRAY WHISTLE TEST, my evil urges took hold of me and in no time "San Francisco" ended up as "Are you blowin' in San Francisco?," "Turn, Turn, Turn" became "O'er everything sperm, sperm, sperm," the New Seekers' treacly "I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony)" degenerated to "I'd like to teach the world to fuck, and make pornography," and even Lobo's innocuous — and stupid — "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" found new filthiness as "Me and You Fucked a Dog Named Boo," a song vastly improved by the substitution a one single word.

And Steppenwolf's epochal "Born To Be wild" felt the wrath in a shortened version created by myself, with assists from John Bligh and Keith Karchner, a few years back. For your edification, here's the long version:

Getcher colon runnin'/Sittin' on the toilet
Gonna make a doody/And ain't nothin' gonna spoil it
Ex-Lax is gonna make it happen
Turn the bowl to a bombed-out space
Fire volleys of fecal schrapnel
All over the place!

Like a true coprophile
I was born, born to defile
Make a pile so high
It's gonna
Touch the sky!
Born to defiiiiile!!!

I dunno why, but that stuff just makes me smile. Aah, maturity...

THE RIBALD SONGBIRD

Time-Life has packaged many fine — though pricey — collections of music honoring many genres over the years, and the television spots for those collections backs in the days used to offer just enough of a snippet of a song to ring the bells of memory. These days we get half hour infomercials that usually haul out some now-forgotten hitmaker of yore, such as Fabian or Gary Puckett, and dump them on some "nostalgic" set representing a malt shop or "lover's lane," the kind of location that was pretty much rendered extinct by Viet Nam, LSD, the Women's Movement, the Pill, and disco. The former star would then cloyingly spew on and on, yes-manned by some co-host that you've never heard of, about "the good old days"and the songs that were the soundtrack to a more innocent time, his comments punctuated by ancient footage of pop artists and teen idols lip-synching their hits on shows like AMERICAN BANDSTAND, SHINDIG, and HULLABALOO.

My formative years came during the ass-end of that fading era, and the first wave of rock 'n' roll nostalgia hit the mass media with a vengeance, bombarding the airwaves with ads for "golden greats," ads played with such heavy rotation that even now people my age can recite them at will, complete with the song clips sung in fair approximation. It was during those years that I developed my love for pre-Beatles rock, appreciating its simplicity and semi-primitivism (or full-blown primitivism in the case of stuff like "Surfin' Bird" or "The Crusher"), and loving it for the ease with which it could be warped into outright filth. People have dirtied-up popular songs since the second that humans began to sing, and there's just something about the cheeriness of pop that makes many folk, such as yours truly, find great pleasure in ruining the innocence of such tunes, forever robbing them of any decency when heard again. Knowing that, it's no surprise that two of my all-time favorite recording artists are masters of the form, namely Blowfly and John "Dr. Dirty" Valby, a two-man Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse whose musical stylings lay smoking waste to the songs they wrap their dirty little minds around. Blowfly even got his nom du filth back in the early 1960's for turning Chubby Checker's innocent "Come on, baby! Let's do the Twist!" into "Come on baby! And suck my dick!" after which a relative told him, "Boy, you nastier than a blowfly!"

I am certainly guilty of this peurile habit, a behavior that has become so ingrained within me that I almost cannot listen to any Top 100 song recorded between 1954 and 1995 without coming up with a dirty version almost instantaneously. My dear friend Wendy is a self-professed "pop queen" whose musical tastes run toward mainstream and popular songs, and when she lived close by and we hung out all the time I couldn't help but to mangle her favorite songs with gleeful gusto. I did this so often during our day-to-day association that the habit began to rub off on her to a small degree, her memories of the real lyrics now suffused with gratuitous usages of "dick," fuck," "pussy," and "shit," a state that I can assure you resulted in me getting yelled at.

This wretched affliction also hobbles the maturity of my pals John, Keith, and most especially Hughes, a Bronx-born Irish lunatic who besmirches his people's gift of song and poetry with a lightning-swift and utterly hilarious knack for extemporized filthy lyrics. During the two decades that I've known these idiots, we've cracked each other up with many a soiled version of familiar favorites, but Hughes still claims the prize with his desecration of the chorus to "Jack and Diane," which posits:

Oh, Yeah/Cream comes out
Out of my dick/Like a water spout

Most pop music isn't meant to be great art; it's meant to be a catchy little ditty that sticks with you for a while, maybe even becoming a favorite, but in terms of true merit much of it is aural junk food. You can enjoy pork rinds, but it sure as hell ain't prime rib, so I say why not have fun with the junk food that you ingest and retool it to be even more fun? I'm certain that Hughes would concur.

That point was driven home over this past weekend when I watched a half-hour informercial for MALT SHOP MEMORIES, a compendium of 150 classic radio hits from roughly 1957-1966, and as I puttered around the Vault I left the ad on for noise, enjoying the oldies and after a while succumbing to the siren-call of smut. I swear I didn't do it intentionally, but I must have been spewing forth filth for about three or four songs when I realized I had added new lyrics to The Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight;" as the grainy footage of the singer performing that number flickered on my TV screen I let fly with "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, your mother sucks my cock!!!" all the while imagining the guy actually performing it as such on live 1950's television. With that realization I stopped washing the dishes, sat down in front of the tube, and awaited each oldie so I could have fun with my little game.

The Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" became "My boyfriend's Black, and he's got a monster penis! Hey-La, Hey-La! My boyfriend's Black!" Mark Dinning's sappy death-rock classic "Teen Angel" was corrupted into "Porn Angel, can you fuck me?" The Righteous Brothers' classic "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" blurted forth as "Your Pussy's Got No Feeling." "Goin' Out of My Head" turned into "Jerkin' off in my bed/Over you!!!" And so it went, my juvenile juices firing on all cylinders.

When the informercial was over I decided to eventually purchase the collection and re-sharpen my MAD magazine by way of GG Allin talents with gusto, all in anticipation of someday passing on my tasteless hobby to my yet-to-be-born progeny. One of my favorite childhood memories is from when I was about seven years old and my dad recited a version of "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" that must have been handed down to him via an oral tradition, and that version of that epic tale of vigilance and patriotism was rewritten to feature Revere's urgent need to take a shit, culminating in "the fifty-yard dash to the toilet seat." That shared moment of naughtiness, okay under certain family circumstances, was wonderful and I can't wait to encourage my own little ones to the nadir of immature bad taste.

Now all I have to do is come up with a nasty version of "Freebird." Perhaps "Free Turd," an anthem about feeling as free as a freshly-deposited, size of a "kid's day" souvenir baseball bat doody... Let's see:

Well, I'm free as a turd now
And this turd is smellin' strange

Yep, I'm on the right track.

And have any of you out there in the internet ether ever felt the call of the Ribald Songbird? Please write in with any such offerings you may recall, especially those passed on by irresponsible parental units and other risque relatives.

HERE I SIT, BROKEN-HEARTED, AND OTHER CLASSICS OF THE YORE

The classy iteration.

Here I sit, broken-hearted
Tried to shit, but only farted

No Matter how you shake and dance
The last drop falls into your pants

Goddamn motherfucking two-ball bitch
Every time I see you my two balls itch

If it smells like a fish, it’s a good dish
If it smells like cologne, leave it alone

-Authors unknown

You are no doubt familiar with the timeless classics above, what with them being standards found in restrooms in public schools and dump stations all over the nation for at least sixty years, including the now outdated second line, “Paid my dime, but only farted.” Sheer, universal poetry, rendered deathless thanks to lovers of sophomoric stupidity, such as yours truly. Most of such odes are first encountered during our early grade school years, when we are first truly old enough to understand dirty/ toilet humor and perhaps even pen our own offensive lyrics. Staples of the genre include such topics as farts, doo-doo, pee-pee, racial slurs/stereotypes, disrespect of religion, television theme song/pop music parodies, and of course preadolescent misconceptions about sex. You know, intellectual stuff.

My own first exposure to such erudite wit was the classic of body-function awareness, “Milk, milk, lemonade,” used to spectacular effect last season on “Will & Grace” in a puerile pas de deux between Megan Mullaly and Jack Black as a doctor who confirms the piece’s biological validity:

Milk, Milk (pointing to each nipple)
Lemonade (pointing to urethra)
Around the corner (turning around)
Fudge is made (pointing to ass)

To a five-year-old, that shit is a comedy goldmine.

Perhaps the granddaddy of the genre of poetic juvenilia is Benny Bell’s recording of “Shaving Cream,” a Dr. Demento show perennial that burned itself into the collective cerebral cortex of children everywhere. The basic gag has the singer recount a particular situation that would end in a rhyme leading the listener to expect the word “shit” to end the line, but the listener is consistently faked out when the naughty word is instead replaced with “shaving cream.” For example:

Way back when I was in the army
I reached down into my kit
Expecting to find me a sandwich
I pulled out a huge pile of
Shaving cream!
Be nice and clean!
Shave every day and you’ll always look keen!

As you would imagine, the variations to this are nearly infinite, and Bell recorded it several times to escalating idiotic effect. My own favorite versions are as follows:

Our baby fell out of the window
You’d think that her head would be split
But luck was with her that morning
‘Cause she fell in a truckload of
Shaving cream!
Be nice and clean!
Shave every day and you’ll always look keen!

Along with:

And now folks my story is over
I think that it’s time I should quit
If any of you feel offended
Stick your head in a bucket of
Shaving cream!
Be nice and clean!
Shave every day and you’ll always look keen!

Even the youngest verbal smut artist could come up with a cornucopia of words that could lead up to the “shit” fake out, ensuring that cross-country trips with the parents became interminable torture for the grownups. And you could totally get away with it because you weren’t guilty of cussing! God bless you, Benny Bell. God fucking bless you.

Proving that such dumbass endeavors transcend the generations, I remember first hearing this when I was six years old from my beloved grandfather, Ozane, who was a huge fan of Tarzan:

Tarzan the monkey man
Swinging on a rubber band
Lost his pants in a hula dance
Aaaah-Ah-AAAAA (imitation of the Tarzan yell, after which Ozane and I would laugh like a couple of morons)

Then I moved to Westport, Connecticunt (misspelling intended) and heard this one on the playground:

Under the cherry tree
That’s where she showed it to me
It was hairy and black
And it had a huge crack
But it looked like a jungle to me
So I took out my hairy banana
And stuck it in her crack
She let out a scream
And I gave her some cream
Then I took my banana back

Armed with such examples it was only a matter of nanoseconds before our filthy little minds advanced to more complex expression of smuttiness, and where better to start than with the corruption of familiar songs from our favorite babysitter, the television? The beginner’s corrupted TV song is unquestionably the following:

I’m Popeye the sailor man
I live in a garbage can
I eat all the worms and spit out the germs
I’m Popeye the sailor man

Sure, it was based on a theme song first heard in the movies during the 1930’s, but the majority of us were first introduced to the incomprehensible mariner via the glass teat, and as times changed and kids became naughtier, the Popeye song was altered into:

I’m Popeye the sailor man
I live in a garbage can
I like to go swimmin’ with bow-legged wimmen
I’m Popeye the sailor man

Then there was the Adam West “Batman” television series, a genuine phenomenon in its day (and the first time I remember my little pee-pee standing at attention thanks to Julie Newmar as Catwoman), with one of the all-time catchiest signature tunes in TV history, instantly dooming it to parody victimization. We all know the holiday classic “Jingle Bells, Batman smells,” but for the purposes of this article I’m sticking to riffs on the Neal Hefti theme, the best of which is easily:

Batman!
Took me to his house
Batman!
Laid me on the couch
Batman!
Stuck it in greasy
Batman!
Pulled it out easy
Batman!
Batman!
Batman!

Most kids thought this was from the point of view of some hot Batman groupie, but I prefer to think of it as being Robin’s recounting of really goes on at Stately Wayne Manor. But where the hell was Alfred?

And of course you know this parody of another 1960’s cult fave:

The Addams Family started
When Uncle Fester farted
They all became retarded
The Addams Family

But the undisputed champion of TV parodies goes to this horrifying version of “The Beverly Hillbillies, “ which transforms the inspiring tale of a poor mountaineer’s discovery of a rich vein of oil and subsequent Croesus-like wealth into a humorous tale of incestuous rape and the inevitable inbred progeny:

Let me tell you a story ‘bout a man named Jed
He grabbed Ellie-Mae and he threw her on the bed
Down came the zipper and out came the Worm
And out of the Worm come the bubblin’ sperm

Well the next thing you know
Ol’ Ellie-Mae’s knocked up
The kinfolk said, “Jed, you’re such a horny pup!”
Nine months later, she began to scream
And out of her twat slid Jethro Beaudine!

What makes this song a classic is the blunting of the incest/rape angle by presenting the visually ludicrous image of Ellie-Mae giving birth to her hulking, L’il Abner-lookalike cousin as played by the huge Max Baer, Jr., complete with overalls and shitkicker boots.

Largely forgotten nowadays is the Fess Parker vehicle “Daniel Boone,” a much less successful follow-up to the monster hit from the 1950’s, “Davy Crockett.” This TV parody may be unique because it blends the forms of playground lyrics and outright, out-of-nowhere racism:

Daniel Boone was a man
He was a big man
But the bear was bigger
So he ran like a nigger
Up a tree

Which seamlessly segues us into the realm of ethnically offensive rhymes and songs!

My earliest exposure to this subgenre surprisingly happened before I moved to the ultra-racist Westport, occurring during my very early days in California, featuring an utterly weak slam at the two major Asian groups in the States at the time:

Chinese, Japanese (while pulling eyes to simulate epicanthic folds)
Dirty knees (miming appraising dirty laundry)
Look at these! (miming lifting of titties)

Now from what has been explained to me, that one can be seen as helping the ignorant to differentiate between the Chinese and the Japanese, namely one group is fit only to do your laundry and the other has awesome prossies who know exactly how to display the dairy goods.

Another slam against the Chinese that I never quite got was the following:

Ching chong Chinaman
Sitting on a fence
Trying to make a dollar
Out of fifteen cents

Exactly what the fuck does that mean?

And let us not forget the classic of American black/white confrontation:

A fight! A Fight! A Nigger and a white!
If the nigger/white guy doesn’t win
Then we all jump in!

Or the more offensive version:

A fight! A Fight! A Nigger and a white!
The White guy had a gun
The nigger had none
The white guy pulled the trigger
And then there was no nigger
Hooray!

Then there was the classic necrophile poem from when the infamous Ed Gein murder case was current in the late 1950’s (google Ed Gein and be ready to be chilled to the soul):

I fucked an old gal in a graveyard
God damn her old soul, she was dead
The maggots crawled out of her asshole
And the hair slipped off of her head
When I finished my job there
I seen I’d committed a sin
So I reached in my pocket and drew me a straw
And I sucked out the load I shot in

And two from the Catholics I knew back in the days:

Hail Mary, full of grace
Won’t you sit upon my face?

And this British gem that contemplates the duality of Christ as both man and God:

Two in one, one in two
Flush ‘em both down the loo

So with that I invite all of you to write in with your own rhymes and such, and always remember that the more juvenile, the better!

And as a final note, here’s a great Beatles parody:

Hey, Jude
I saw you nude
Don’t try to fake it
I saw you naked

"Don't try to fake it..."