This analysis is not unlike that of Nostradamus’ quatrains.
:rolleyes:
Well, yeah, sure, but Nostradamus couldn’t draw for beans.
I loves me some “Deck Us All With Boston Charlie,” yup, I sure do. One of my favorite Christmas records is Lambert, Hendricks and Ross singing the first verse in their most bombastic amateur-caroler style, twice, with Jon Hendricks providing a couple of choruses of scat for the middle.
But when I try to sing the song in toto, using the lyrics I learned from reading my first Straight Dope book, I get all hung up on the second verse:
ISTM that ‘Donkey Bonny Brays a carol" rhymes better with “Chollie’s collie barks at Barrow” than it does with “Bark us all bow-wows of folly.” And "Hunky Dory’s pop is lolly gaggin’ on the wagon" doesn’t seem to fit, syllable-wise.
For my own use, I rearrange things slightly:
That seems to work best for me. Please put down the pitchforks and torches; I’m not going to try to disseminate this in violation of convention. I just thought I’d share my thoughts.
“Dead? I didn’t even know he was sick!”
They list is incomplete, of course. There’s also this one:
“Tickle salty boss anchovy
Wash a wash a wall Anna Kangaroo
Dooby dooby dumdum dooby
Dooby dooby dooby dooby dooby doo doo”
(Listed in “Prehysterical Pogo (in Pandemonia)”)
Actually, my favorite Walt Kelly song parody was this one:
“Beetle heifer soak crumble tear snowflakes sly comb.”
And, of course:
“I was eating some chop suey with a lady in St. Looie
When I suddenly heard a knocking at the door.
And the knocker he said “Honey”
Roll the Rocker out some money
Or your Daddy shoots a baddy to the floor.”
Or:
“As it shone on the schoon of Fraulein McGoon yclept Molly
Gemutlich she chose to sing through the nose
Of mein leibling rose on the Tra-lee
So it’s ding ding an’ oh!
They love me in St. Joe
When I go Gottleib go,
I go jolly.”
Kelly was a genius and unlike the other great genius of comic strips – George Herriman – the humor of his strip could appeal to everyone. Even ignoring the barbed political satire, the strip was filled with puns, wordplay, wild characters, poetry and more general silliness in a single strip than Garfield has managed in its entire run (all right, cheap target – change that to “than most any strip can manage in a month”).
There isn’t a comic strip artist that doesn’t wish he or she had half of Kelly’s talent.
That’s in one of the comparatively recent Pogo omnibus editions (The Best of Pogo, Pogo Even Better, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, Outrageously Pogo, etc.), that mix reprinted Pogo cartoons with other pieces by Kelly and articles by other people. But I can’t remember which book the “Boston Charlie as a coded reference to jail life” article is in, nor the name of its author.
And I never could figure out whether it was supposed to be just a light-hearted fictional riff on typical “socio-historical background of art” commentary, or whether there were actually some grains of truth in it. I incline to the first explanation, though.
As for other Kelly song parodies, I always enjoyed
“Oh give me a home
'Twixt Buffalo and Rome…”
Can’t remember the rest of it, though, if there was any rest.
The prison/Boston Charlie explanation is given in Phi Beta Pogo, edited by Mrs. Walt Kelly and Bill Crouch Jr., Fireside/Simon and Schuster, published 1989, pages 240-241.
". . . Wilbur Crane Eveland, who along with Bill Vaughan of the Kansas City Star was probably Walt’s closest friend had been saving it [this story] for a biography of Kelly that he had planned to write . . .
"He [Kelly] made no distinctions with respect to his audiences; the staff of the Harvard Crimson was no more attractive to him than an assemblage of convicts. It was for these convicts, for many of whom he had sympathy, that Kelly wrote, ‘Deck Us All with Boston Charlie.’ . . .Walla Walla, Kalamazoo, Pensacola, and Louisville are all the sites of state prisons. “Boston Charlie” was the name given to all guards in prisons–you can look up “Charlie” in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and you will find that he is the man with the stick, the prison guard. Why Boston? A throwback, in all probability, to the days of the original Colonies.
“Why is Nora ‘freezin’ on the trolley?’ Nora is the cognomen given to sexual partners of male prison inmates and the answer to his cold condition comes in two parts. The trolley is the wire that inmates string between cells for use in passing to one another. Thus, Nora was not communicating via the trolley. The second aspect of the line is that a person in the “freezer” is in solitary confinement, so Nora was not only not communicating, he/she had been slapped into solitary.”
That’s quite a stretch, a most tortured explanation. Nearly as bad as American Pie. I’m dubious, myself.
TubaDiva
Reminded that indeed we are all God’s Screechers.
I’m dubious, too, but the cities mentioned do have correctional facilities.