According to an anthology of American popular songs, the melody for this song was assembled from Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” and two other songs, one mentioning an “old-fashioned garden.” According to this work, the original lyrics would fit into the tune like this:
Hallelujah! Bananas,
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me!
I dreamt that_ I dwelt_ in mar_-ble halls,_
The kind that you seldom see;
I was walk_-ing Hel_-en home,_,
From an old-fasioned garden,
But Hallelujah! Bananas,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me!
At least, I think those middle lines are right–but they don’t scan properly with the “Bananas” lyrics that replaced the original.
Can any Dopers make the necessary corrections, to show what original lyrics went with those parts of the melody?
Dougie:
The lines are:
I was seeing Nellie home
To an old fashioned garden
The meter doesn’t fit “Bananas” exactly, but melodies and lyrics are like that. Plenty of songs have elisions or extra pulses that don’t fit an earlier verse.
BTW, I believe it was a musician named Sigmund Spaeth who discovered this fact about “Yes! We Have No Bananas!” I’d be interested to hear if other songs have borrowed lines from previously written music. Besides “My Sweet Lord”, I mean.
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
Is it true that the last part of the Jeopardy theme song was lifted from “I’m a Little Teapot”? L
Well, I guess y’already know that most of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas?”
And that Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” fits perfectly to “Hernando’s Hideaway?”
If they don’t, Eve, it’s a mitzvah to let them know. Of course, it’s MUCH more fun to sing Emily to the tune of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme…
Okay, everybody…ah-one…ah-two…
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held just bust Ourselves –
And Immortality.
Uke
Scott Joplin’s Magnetic Rag (1914) has a section that’s lifted straight out of Living a Ragtime Life, a popular song from 1900!
(Which Joplin didn’t write.)
“The Carriage held just bust Ourselves . . .”
OK, I don’t ordinarily point out people’s funny typos—but considering what you E’d me privately about an hour ago . . . Ike, go take a cold shower, willya?
Good thing I didn’t type “jut butt,” huh?
I listened to the Dr. Demento show as long as a Los Angeles station carried him. His cohort Whimsical Will (Simpson) did the Demented News, which often contained a “Copycat Corner,” in which he would play two songs, in the vein of “My Sweet Lord” (cf. Cecil’s first Straight Dope book), for the listeners to compare and decided for themsleves if one copied the other. One of these was a ballad recorded in the late 50s by Guy Mitchell, titled “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” The beginning went like this:
There’s a pawnshop on a corner
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
He compared it to “Little Boxes,” written about that time by Malvina Reynolds:
Little Boxes, on the hillside,
Little Boxes made of ticky-tack
(For reasons I don’t need to go into here, the first song usually makes me cry hard–so every time I hear the second song I cry too. 
Thanks for the info on the poems that can be sung to popular songs. I remember a friend from a few years ago discovered that “Jabberwocky” can be sung (with a few modifications) to the tune of “Gilligan’s Island”.
Also, I once heard (about 20 years ago, now) the lyrics to “Gilligan’s Island” sung to the tune of “Stairway To Heaven”. It was called “Stairway To Gilligan’s Island”. Anyone else familiar with this?
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
Someone came up with a cassette of “Funniest Computer Songs.” The last one on Side 1 (the other side is Side 0) is “Do It Yourself,” or “You Can Build a Mainframe from the Things You Find at Home”; I found that the lyrics fit the meter of “MacNamara’s Band”! 
The last verse goes like this:
Well, I got my system running, I’ll admit it’s not the best
The data isn’t right and the response time is a mess
It crashes every hour, and it isn’t worth a damn
But I’m satisfied because it runs just like an IBM! 
To the tune of The House of the Rising Sun:
Oh Mary had… a little lamb
It’s fleece was whiiiiite as snow
And eve-rewhere
That Mary went
The lamb was sure to go…
M22-24236
Try swapping the lyrics from “Stairway to Heaven” and “Flirtin’ With Disaster” some time. The music and lyrics were made for each other.
you can also sing “Amazing Grace” to the “Gilligan’s Island” theme.
Interesting comment, because of this:
In Mad Magazine’s parody of the Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie The Sting, artist Mort Drucker gets in a barb at a modern composer who contributed to the production of the movie. In the “splash panel” beginning the satire of the movie, the background shows a building with two windows side by side. On one is lettered:
SCOTT JOPLIN–MUSIC
On the other is lettered:
MARVIN HAMMISCH–EXPLOITER
Any Dopers remember “Vive L’Amour”?
Let ev’ry young fellow come join in this song;
Vive la compagnie!..
Vive l’amour, vive l’amour, Vive la Compagnie!
Around 1907, writer Franklin P. Adams composed “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” about the Chicago Cubs’ double-play combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second-baseman Johnny Evers (pronounced EE-vers, not EVV-ers, according to Lee Allen), and first-baseman Frank Chance:
These are the saddest of possible words,
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Trio of bear Cubs and fleeter than birds,
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double [play],
Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble,
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
This poem can be sung to “Vive La Compagnie”! 
Several years later, Johnny Evers had become manager of the Cubs. They lost the exhibition city Series that year to the White Sox, and owner Charles Webb Murphy fired him. People sympathetic to Evers (and to Chance, whom Murphy had also fired) pulled strings, including contact with National League President John Tener and Charles P. Taft, the President’s brother. Murphy was quickly forced to sell out.
The Sporting Life, a newspaper much like the current Sporting News, heralded this action with a similar poem, which can also be sung to the French song:
Brought to the leash and smashed in the jaw,
Evers to Tener to Taft.
Hounded and hustled outside of the law,
Evers to Tener to Taft.
Cut from the Cubs and the glory untold,
Stripped of the guerdons and glitter of old,
Kicked in the stomach and cut from the fold,
Evers to Tener to Taft.
Okay, the information below is totally-unprecedented
**Coleridge SPOILER info!!!{/b]
If you love Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and wish to continue to enjoy his verse unhindered by giggling, please do NOT read the information below.
Really.
Okay, I warned you.
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner can be sung to the tune of Gilligan’s Island.
All the way through.
There… is an ancient mariner
Who stoppeth one of three…
For a while, I’ve thought “The Tyger” by William Blake sounds good when put to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
On the list of things you can sing to the tune of Gilligan’s Island, on the first weekend of college, when they haul all the freshmen into the auditorium, among the things they do is bring up the head of the music department and attempt to coerce the freshman class into learining the alma mater. Before you get to actually hear the tune, though, you sing it to the tune of Gilligan’s Island:
To Juniata College dear
In praise we raise our song…