The Ballad of the Top Ten: The Ballad of Davy Crew-Cut (#7)

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More fog, but at least it’s comfortable outside. We don’t have to worry about freezing fog. What you, however, have to worry about is THIS. Here’s another song with “the ballad of” in the title…and boy, are you gonna be sorry! #7: The Ballad of Davy Crew-Cut - Homer and Jethro Back in the 50s there was a “Davy Crockett” craze. With the explosion of television as an entertainment medium, why not just put him on TV! That’s what Walt Disney did in 1954, with Fess Parker playing the legendary Tennessee-born frontiersman who later died in the Battle of the Alamo in Texas. The craze included “coonskin caps” that seemingly every boy wore (there’s even a reference to it in Back to the Future) and the hit “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” For the past 40 years or so musicians have considered it a “badge of honor” to have one of their hits spoofed by Weird Al Yankovic. Well, that’s nothing new, because in the 50s and 60s everyone wanted to be the “victim” of a Homer & Jethro parody. The story goes that people would send copies of their songs to RCA just in case Homer and Jethro hadn’t heard them! Hindsight is 20/20, of course; and, in that regard, you can see the amazing foresight Homer (Henry Haynes) and Jethro (Kenneth Burns) had in their parody selection. There are very few songs that they did that weren’t legendary. They even got a Grammy for spoofing “The Battle of New Orleans” the same year that Johnny Horton got his Grammy for it! So of course they were going to lay into the Davy Crockett fad with both barrels! And you might as well knock off two birds with one stone, so they put a subtle dig in at the Canadian vocal group the Crew-Cuts (best known for the song “Sh-Boom [Life Could Be a Dream]”) in the title. Loaded with jokes (“he used a bicycle pump to blow up his bubble gum,” “when he sucked his thumb he used a straw”) and exaggerations (“became a politician in Washington, DC, he took him a bribe when he was only three”), the song skewered the fad and the song as only Homer and Jethro could. It’s also notable for being one of the very few songs that Homer didn’t play guitar on. That’s him on the mouth harp. Oh, and PS: the songwriter? Not that George Burns. The Ballad of Davy Crew-Cut Original song by Thomas Blackburn and George Burns Parody lyrics by Henry Haynes and Kenneth Burns Recorded by Homer and Jethro Released as a single, 1955 Born in a taxicab in Tennessee: