Allen Sherman

Allan Sherman (born Allan Copelon or Allan Gerald Copelon; November 30, 1924 – November 20, 1973) was an American musician, satirist, and television producer who became known as a song parodist in the early 1960s. His first album, ''My Son, the Folk Singer'' (1962), became the fastest-selling record album up to that time.Thomas, Bob (Associated Press). "Fat and fortyish but star no less," ''Ottawa Herald'', December 13, 1962, page 10: ''"Warner Brothers Records report that it is the fastest-selling album in history, having sold 575,000 in six weeks. With the Christmas season coming up, it might push over a million."'' Retrieved April 14, 2016, via NewspaperArchive.com His biggest hit was "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", a comic song in which a boy describes his summer camp experiences to the tune of Ponchielli's ''Dance of the Hours''.

Early life

Sherman was born on November 30, 1924, in Chicago, Illinois, to Percy Copelon and Rose Sherman. Percy was an auto mechanic and race car driver from Birmingham, Alabama who suffered from obesity (he weighed over 350 pounds) and died while attempting a 100-day diet. Sherman's family was Jewish. His parents divorced when he was seven, and he adopted his mother's maiden name. Because his parents frequently moved to new residences, he attended 21 public schools in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. For his High School years, he attended Fairfax High School in Los Angeles where he graduated in 1941. He later attended the University of Illinois, where he earned mostly "C" grades and contributed a humor column to ''The Daily Illini'', the college newspaper. He was expelled for breaking into the Sigma Delta Tau sorority house with his girlfriend and future wife, Dolores "Dee" Chackes.

Television writer and producer

Sherman devised a game show with comedy writer Howard Merrill he intended to call ''I Know a Secret''. Television producer Mark Goodson adapted Sherman's idea into '' I've Got a Secret'', which ran on CBS from 1952 to 1967. Rather than pay him for the concept, Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions made Sherman the show's producer; Merrill was paid a royalty and withdrew from the project. "You couldn't help but be fond of Allan, as long as you didn't have to work with him," recalled Goodson-Todman executive Gil Fates. "Notice I said ''with'' him. He was always kind and understanding to those who worked ''for'' him." Sherman clashed with anyone who disagreed with his ideas or tried to restrain his creativity. As producer of ''I've Got a Secret'', which was broadcast live, he showed a fondness for large-scale stunts that teetered on the brink of disaster. He once released 100 rabbits onstage as an Easter surprise for the Madison Square Boys Club, whose members were seated in the studio. The boys were invited to come up onstage to collect their prize. Although the resultant melee made a good story, it did not necessarily make for good television. Fates saw that host Garry Moore, "who was out on stage trying to protect the bunnies as best he could, realized that the spot was beyond salvage. Most of the kids gave back the rabbits".

In his autobiography ''A Gift of Laughter'', Sherman writes that he was fired from ''I've Got a Secret'' in 1958, the night when guest star Tony Curtis demonstrated childhood street games. First, Curtis had never heard of the games that Sherman wanted to stage, resulting in awkward reenactments. Then, according to Sherman, Henry Morgan was left short of scripted material by seven minutes, and Morgan filled the time by berating Sherman on air. However, the episode in question does not run short. Morgan ends it abruptly and says that they have run out of time. "The spot was not only a fiasco but also a catastrophe," recalled Fates. "That show was Goodson's last straw and Allan's last ''I've Got a Secret''. Within hours, the reaction from the network and the sponsors was in, and Allan was out." Sherman was replaced by associate producer Chester Feldman.

Sherman also produced a short-lived 1954 game show ''What's Going On?'', which was technologically ambitious, with studio guests interacting with multiple live cameras in remote locations. In 1961, he produced a daytime game show for Al Singer Productions called ''Your Surprise Package'', which aired on CBS with host George Fenneman.

Song parodies

In 1951, Sherman recorded a 78-rpm single with veteran singer Sylvia Froos that contains "A Satchel and a Seck", parodying " A Bushel and a Peck" from ''Guys and Dolls'', coupled with "Jake's Song", parodying "Sam's Song", a contemporary hit for Bing Crosby and his son Gary. The single sold poorly and when Sherman wrote his autobiography, he did not mention it. Later, he found that the song parodies he performed to amuse his friends and family were taking on a life of their own. Sherman lived in the Brentwood section of West Los Angeles next door to Harpo Marx, who invited him to perform his song parodies at parties attended by Marx's show-biz friends. After one party, George Burns phoned an executive at Warner Bros. Records and persuaded him to sign Sherman to a contract. The result was an LP of these parodies, ''My Son, the Folk Singer'', released in 1962. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. The album was very successful and was quickly followed by ''My Son, the Celebrity''.

Capitalizing on his success, in 1962 Jubilee Records re-released Sherman's 1951 single on the album ''More Folk Songs by Allan Sherman and His Friends'', which compiled material by various Borscht Belt comedians such as Sylvia Froos, Fyvush Finkel and Lee Tully.

Sherman's first two LPs were mainly reworkings of old folk songs to infuse them with Jewish humor. His first minor hit was "Sarah Jackman" (pronounced "Jockman"), a takeoff of "Frère Jacques" in which he and a woman (Christine Nelson) exchange family gossip. The popularity of "Sarah Jackman" (as well as the album ''My Son, the Folk Singer'') was enhanced after President John F. Kennedy was overheard singing the song in the lobby of the Carlyle hotel. By his peak with '' My Son, the Nut'' in 1963, however, Sherman had broadened both his subject matter and his choice of parody material and begun to appeal to a larger audience.

Sherman wrote his parody lyrics in collaboration with Lou Busch. A few of the Sherman/Busch songs are completely original creations, featuring original music as well as lyrics, rather than new lyrics applied to an existing melody.

However, Sherman had trouble in getting permission to record for profit from some well-known composers and lyricists, who did not tolerate parodies or satires of their melodies and lyrics, including Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Ira Gershwin, Meredith Willson, Alan Jay Lerner, and Frederick Loewe, as well as the estates of Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Kurt Weill, George Gershwin and Bertolt Brecht, which prevented him from releasing parodies or satires of their songs. In the late 1950s, Sherman was inspired by a recording of a nightclub musical show called ''My Fairfax Lady'', a parody of ''My Fair Lady'' set in the Jewish section of Los Angeles that was performed at Billy Gray's Band Box. Sherman then wrote his own song parodies of ''My Fair Lady'', which appeared as a bootleg recording in 1964, and were officially released in 2005 on ''My Son, the Box''. Alan Jay Lerner did not approve of having the parody being performed; however, he reluctantly settled to allow the performances of "Fairfax Lady", on the strict conditions that the show could be allowed to be performed only inside the Fairfax Theater, without any touring company, and that the musical could not be videotaped or recorded for any album.

Although Sherman believed that all the songs parodied on ''My Son, the Folk Singer'' were in the public domain, two of them, "Matilda" and "Water Boy"–parodied as "My Zelda" and "Seltzer Boy", respectively–were actually under copyright, and Sherman was sued for copyright infringement.

In 1963's ''My Son, the Nut'', Sherman's pointed parodies of classical and popular tunes dealt with automation in the workplace ("Automation", to the tune of " Fascination"), space travel ("Eight Foot Two, Solid Blue", to " Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue"), summer camp ("Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", to the tune of ''Dance of the Hours'' by Ponchielli), the exodus from the city to the suburbs ("Here's to the Crabgrass", to the tune of " English Country Garden"), and his own bulky physique ("Hail to Thee, Fat Person", which claims his obesity was a public service similar to the Marshall Plan). Seven cartoon bears were printed on back of every album.

A Top 40 hit

One track from ''My Son, the Nut'', a spoof of summer camp titled "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", became a surprise novelty hit, reaching No. 2 on the national ''Billboard'' Hot 100 chart for three weeks in late summer 1963. The lyrics were sung to the tune of one segment of Ponchielli's ''Dance of the Hours''. That December, Sherman's " The Twelve Gifts of Christmas" single appeared on ''Billboard''s separate Christmas chart. Sherman had one other Top 40 hit, a 1965 take-off on the Petula Clark hit "Downtown" called " Crazy Downtown", which spent one week at #40. Two other Sherman singles charted in the lower regions of the ''Billboard'' 100: an updated "Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh" (#59 in 1964), and "The Drinking Man's Diet" (#98 in 1965). Sherman's "The End of a Symphony", spotlighting Arthur Fiedler's Boston Pops Orchestra, reached #113 on the "Bubbling Under" chart in 1964, but did not make the Hot 100.

The songs on Sherman's next album ''My Name Is Allan'' (1965) were thematically connected: except for a couple of original novelty songs with music by Sherman and Busch, all the songs on the album are parodies of songs that had won, or were nominated for, the Academy Award for Best Song. They included "That Old Black Magic", "Secret Love", " The Continental", "Chim Chim Cher-ee" and "Call Me Irresponsible". The cover of the album bore a childhood photograph of Sherman. That, and the album's title, were references to Barbra Streisand's album ''My Name Is Barbra'', released earlier that year, which featured a cover photograph of the singer as a young girl.

During his brief heyday, Sherman's parodies were so popular that he had at least one contemporary imitator: ''My Son the Copycat'' was an album of song parodies performed by Stanley Ralph Ross, co-written by Ross and Bob Arbogast. Lest there be any doubt of whom Ross is copying, his album's cover bears a crossed-out photo of Sherman. One of the songs on this album is a fat man's lament, "I'm Called Little Butterball", parodying "I'm Called Little Buttercup" from Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta ''HMS Pinafore''. Sherman would later parody this same song as "Little Butterball" – with the same subject matter – on his album ''Allan in Wonderland''. The song may have had more poignancy for Sherman, as he, unlike Stanley Ross, was genuinely overweight. Sherman also parodied Gilbert and Sullivan's "Titwillow" from ''The Mikado'', in the song "The Bronx Bird-Watcher" (on ''My Son, the Celebrity''), as well as several other Gilbert and Sullivan songs.

Later work

In 1965, Sherman published an autobiography, ''A Gift of Laughter'', and, for a short period at least, he was culturally ubiquitous. He sang on and guest-hosted ''The Tonight Show'', was involved in the production of Bill Cosby's first three albums, appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and sang "The Dropouts' March" on the March 6, 1964, edition of the NBC satirical program ''That Was The Week That Was''.

Also in 1964, Sherman narrated his own version of Prokofiev's ''Peter and the Wolf'' in a live concert at Tanglewood with the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler. The concert, which was released by RCA Victor Red Seal

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