predecessor

This is disturbing, in a niche sort of way.

Allan Sherman's 1964 song parody album Allan in Wonderland includes "Holiday for States," in which Sherman rattles off the names of all 50 U.S. states in 60 seconds flat to a modified version of the tune of David Rose's instrumental piece "Holiday for Strings."

This song has long been a Sherman favorite in our family, and my brother has the whole thing memorized.

So Mark Evanier has just found something disturbing: a clip from The Ed Sullivan Show, so this is not a little-known venue, from 1956 of a comedy team called Davis and Reese performing a routine that concludes with a 48-state version of "Holiday for States." That's 8 years before Sherman put it on his album.

(Alaska and Hawaii were admitted in 1959. In 1964, Sherman added another bar of Rose's original to cover Alaska, moved Nebraska over to rhyme with it, and inserted Hawaii where Nebraska had been. That's the only changes in the run through the states.)

I'm not encouraging you to watch the 1956 version. It's thoroughly unfunny. That's Pepper Davis, the one of the team who couldn't sing, tunelessly bellowing out the litany of states, with Tony Reese as straight man. I had to look Davis and Reese up on IMDB, because they're so (deservedly) forgotten as to leave no trace, singly or together, on Wikipedia. (If you try looking them up there, you'll get the movie Legally Blonde, which starred Matthew Davis and Reese Witherspoon.) But Ed Sullivan liked booking any comedian he could get, funny or not.

But what's the story here? Did Sherman write the lyrics for Davis and Reese and then appropriate the song for himself? Did he steal it from them? Did they both take it from someone else? Sherman's album credits Rose's tune but says Sherman wrote all the lyrics, but the credits are not always complete. (My mother was the person who discovered that the tune for "Lotsa Luck" on the same album was a piece by Victor Herbert, and I did get that fact to stick on Wikipedia.) Evanier has no explanation for this. Mark Cohen's biography of Sherman says nothing about "Holiday for States" at all. It's a disturbing mystery.