Mairzy Doats

Mairzy Doats is a novelty song composed in 1943 by Milton Drake, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston. It was first played on radio station WOR, New York, by Al Trace and his Silly Symphonists. The song made the pop charts several times, with a version by the Merry Macs reaching No. 1 in March 1944. A success on the home front, it was also a hit with American servicemen overseas, who allegedly used its nonsensical lyrics as passwords.

At first glance the song's refrain, as written on the sheet music, seems meaningless:

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey

A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?

However, the lyrics of the bridge provide a clue:

If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey,

Sing "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy."

With this aid, the refrain is quite easily comprehended, and the ear will detect the hidden message of the final line: "A kid'll eat ivy too, wouldn't you?"

History

One of the writers, Milton Drake, says the song is based on an English nursery rhyme. According to this story, Drake's four-year-old daughter came home singing "Cowzy tweet and sowzy tweet and liddle sharksy doisters."^[1] (Cows eat wheat and sows eat wheat and little sharks eat oysters.)

Drake joined Hoffman and Livingston to come up with a tune for the new version of the rhyme. But for a year no one was willing to publish a "silly song." Finally, Hoffman pitched it to his friend Al Trace, bandleader of the appropriately-named Silly Symphonists. Trace liked the song and recorded it. It became a huge hit, most notably with the Merry Macs' vocally deft 1944 recording.

Spike Jones was among several other artists who covered it, characteristically substituting sound effects for the "food" words.

The song was used in movies by Stan Laurel ("The Big Noise", 1944) and Woody Allen ("Radio Days", 1987.) It was featured several times on the BBC radio show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue — most notably sung by Graeme Garden. Shari Lewis sang it on television's Lamb Chop's Play-Along, and it was also heard in the The Beer Hunter episode of the British television series Minder. The evocative title, sans song, was once borrowed for an episode of BBC's "Goodnight Sweetheart." Though "Mairzy Doats" is above all cheerful and childlike in character, director David Lynch managed to give it the best known rendition with a sinister twist in the episode opening the second season of Twin Peaks, when Ray Wise's harrowing performance betrayed the madness of his character, Leland Palmer. The song was used to a similar effect in the 2000 horror film "The Cell". Serial killer Carl Stargher, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, sings the song to himself while in the bathtub. A version of the song can be heard briefly in the James Garner 1965 WWII suspense film "36 Hours". Alan Alda, as Hawkeye Pierce, on an episode of the tv series M*A*S*H, recites a couple of lines from the song while teaching Korean locals how to speak English.

In 1963 an up-tempo rock'n'roll version of "Mairzy Doats" was recorded by Carlo Mastrangelo of the Belmonts and released as a 45" record on Laurie Records the same year.

"Mairzy Doats" received a minor revival in 1967, when it was recorded by The Innocence who took it to Number 75 on the Pop Top 100 on Kama Sutra Records.

The song is popularly (and possibly apocryphally) said to have featured in a creative graffito in Liverpool, England, where a sign posted by the "Mersey Docks & Harbour Board" had the handwritten words "And little lambs eat ivy" appended to it.

See also

Children's literature portal

• Mondegreen
• Folklore
• Oral tradition

References

1. ^ Randall, Dale B. J. (1995). "American "Mairzy" Dottiness, Sir John Fastolf's Secretary, and the "Law French" of a Caroline Cavalier". American Speech (Duke University Press) 70 (4): 361–370. doi:10.2307/455617. JSTOR 455617. 

External links

• Sheet Music
• Recording by the Merry Macs