I was reading a magazine article recently in which a famous actress mentioned a party trick she does–singing “Amazing Grace” to the theme songs of Gilligan’s Island and Dallas . It actually works and it’s pretty funny.
I was recently watching Jesus Christ Superstar and during the third or so repeat of the Apostles song (Look at all my trials and tribulations, sinking in a gentle pool of wine, etc.) I found myself singing Everything’s up to date in Kansas City, they’ve gone about as far as they can go… from Oklahoma .
Along similar lines, there was a gal at work who could sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame by starting out on “me” and having the last word be “take.” Follow the melody note-for-note but be one syllable off. It’s hard to do but she had it down. I haven’t tried that with other songs but it might be fun.
I know a version that’s similar to that, where the first two beats are the words “take me”, “out” occurs on the third beat, and everthing is kind of pushed up a beat. It’s hard to explain, but it works, and the ending is rather abrupt.
Here’s a list I’ve accumulated from the SDMB and other sources.
Stairway to Heaven
Gilligan’s Island
Amazing Grace
House of the Rising Sun
O Little Town of Bethlehem
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Australian National Anthem (Advance, Australia Fair)
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
any Emily Dickinson poem
Yellow Rose of Texas
America the Beautiful
The Marine Corps song “From the halls of Montezuma”
My Darling Clementine
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy
On top of Old Smokey/spaghetti
Chariots of Fire
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider
Stan Rogers’ “Mary Ellen Carter”
Rubber Duckie
Surfer Girl
Devil Went Down To Georgia
The Thing (Phil Harris)
A Day in the Life
Green Acres
William Blake’s Tyger, Tyger: to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little
Star.
Jabberwocky
Greensleeves
First part of “Stairway to Heaven”
“Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
Camp Granada (“Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”) (with minor alterations)
Smells Like Teen Spirit (loud section)
The band Orbital used to do a great mix of Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” and Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” back in the day. The two choruses blended together beautifully.
Actually, the beauty of this record is that it wasn’t simply the words of “Gilligan’s Island” sung to a different tune. It was the words and melody of “Gilligan’s Island” juxtaposed against the instrumental accompaniment of “Stairway to Heaven,” a much more subtle and clever concept. It did spawn a rash of imitations (such as the “Day in the Life”/“Green Acres” combination mentioned by rowrrbazzle and want2know) by folks who didn’t seem to get the joke, and were simply singing the words of one song the the tune of another.
Though not a perfect fit, Amazing Grace also works with the Mickey Mouse song:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,
A-M-A, Z-I-N, G-R-A-C-E.
I once was lost but now am found was blind but now I see,
A-M-A, Z-I-N, G-R-A-C-E.
Amazing grace, amazing grace
amazing grace, amazing grace
I once discovered that the ABC song (a b c d e f g, h i j k, lmnop, etc. . .) fit quite well with Tom Petty’s “Last Dance with Mary Jane” with the alphabet itself comprising the verse, followed by the chorus:
Now I’ve said my ABC’s
tell me what you think of me-e -e.
I can do my numbers too,
Listen to how good I do-oo-oo.
Question 1: Where the hell does this come from? I can sing this as well (I prefer to end on “game” with the melody unresolved because it’s weird), but have no idea where I first heard it.
Semi-relevant aside B: I read once (sorry, loked for a cite and failed) that the songwriting team behind Squeeze worked like this: Chris Difford wrote new lyrics to an existing song by someone else, then Glen Tilbrook gets the words without knowing the melody and he writes a new melody. So in theory every Difford-Tillbrook song can be sung to whatever the original melody was.
Damned if that isn’t some fine deductive reasoning! Wonder what it must be.
As for the origin of the off-beat TMOTTBG, not a clue beyond the fact that I first heard this gal’s version in 1968 or so. Must be older than that because this gal never exhibited an original thought.
danceswithcats: LOL! Maybe in the spelling part replace the first pause with the ''z" - “A-M-A-Z-I-N-G, G-R-A-C-E”?
Dunno, but there’s a similar bit of choir humor. In the carol “The First Noel”, the second verse begins, “They lookéd up and saw a star”. If you’re not paying attention, there’s a tendency to sing “look-” and “-éd” on just one note each rather than two each. Then you’re out of synch. Intentionally doing this while on a break is the choir humor :).
I heard the Emily Dickinson poems/“Yellow Rose of Texas” item several years ago. My mother was appalled when I told her. She likes Dickinson.
The Labour Party anthem “The Red Flag” was originally sung to a jaunty Scots Jacobite tune, “The White Cockade”; the writer was supposedly furious when it was reset to the more dirge-like “Tannenbaum”.
