Articles

My Son, The Millionaire - January 4, 1963 - Time Magazine

Comin' Thro' the Rye comes through like this:

Do no make a stingy sandwich.

Pile the cold cuts high..

Customers should see salami

Comin' thro' the rye.

Last week was a big one for the man who sings them that way. Quite recently Allan Sherman was an obscure TV producer, who liked to entertain friends by singing familiar songs with lyrics marinated in Jewish humor. Then, during the fall he made a record called My Son, the Folk Singer, which has sold a million copies and made a world-famous nut of him. Last week on the day that his new album My Son, the Celebrity was released, he gave a concert in Carnegie Hall.

In the sanctuary of Carnegie, he could sing the old songs that used to thrill his friends but cannot be parodied on records because they are not in the public domain- big brassy Broadway tunes like 76 Sol Cohens and the entire score of South Passaic (Younger Than Springstein, There Is Nothing Like a Lox). Movie tunes too. Moon River becomes "Chopped liver, rolled up in a ball…"

Sherman is a plump, crew-cut chipmunk man with black-rimmed glasses and a blinking diffidence that suggests he would like to make apologies throughout the harbor for the fact that his ship came in so fast. He is 38. He was born in Chicago and raised by his mother, his father, and three successive stepfathers in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and New York. He went to 21 public schools and the University of Illinois. After rolling around TV for some years, he helped think up I've Got a Secret and dropped into relative security as its producer.

His new record leaves folk songs largely behind and roams the boundaries of the public domain. Since Gilbert and Sullivan are there now, Sherman has a go at When I Was a Lad from II.M.S. Pinafore: "So I thank old Yale and I thank the Lord/ And I also thank my father who is chairman of the board." Aura Lee emerges this way: "Every time you take vaccine, take it orally . . ." But the best of all is a number in which Queen Victoria sings the Bill Bailey melody, sniffing, "Disraeli, won't you please come home?"

You claim official business took you away

To Egypt and Bombay and Rome.

Well, I'm not so certain,

Because you're the 19th century Richard Burton-

Disraeli, won't you please come home