Last week we featured America's first Number One hit record - a lovely Canadian ballad. From two decades later, here's another Number One record - not half as lovely, but pneumatically unforgettable. It hit the top exactly sixty years ago - in August 1960. One, two, three, four, stick around, we'll tell you more:
She was afraid to come out of the locker
She was as nervous as she could be
She was afraid to come out of the locker
She was afraid that somebody would seeOne, two, three, four, tell the people what she wore...
Here's Brian Hyland with Dick Clark on "The Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show", July 16th 1960:
As an itsy bitsy teenie weenie contribution to American pop culture, the above is chiefly of interest to me because of a bizarre coda. A decade-and-a-half back, The New York Times was working overtime leaking national security secrets and the Associated Press had the Iraq "insurgents"' in-house photographer on their payroll. But that didn't mean they were too busy to print less ambitious rubbish. And so the "Corrections" column in the Times of September 9th 2006 carried this little gem:
An obituary yesterday by The Associated Press incorrectly reported that Paul Vance, the co-writer of the 1960 hit song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," died in Ormond Beach, Fla., on Sept. 6. The man who died was named Paul Van Valkenburgh, whose widow asserted that he had written the song under the name Paul Vance. The Paul Vance who wrote the song is alive.
What a bizarre choice of identity theft. The late Mr Van Valkenburgh – that is, the one who was really late – had told his wife when they married that he was the writer of "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" and he kept up his itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow-bellied fibberooni for 32 years. "His songs were as lighthearted as his personality," his widow Rose told the Associated Press. "When he was young, he sold all the rights to the songs because he was young and foolish, and now 'Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' is becoming popular again."
Amazing. I can understand pretending to be the fellow who wrote "It Had To Be You" or "The Way You Look Tonight", but what kind of guy would claim to have written "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini"? Yet what do I know? Evidently, circa 1973, it was quite an effective line with the ladies. Thirteen years earlier, when the real non-deceased Paul Vance conceived the idea for the song, he asked a pal of his, Jack Segal, if he'd like to compose the tune. Segal said no thanks, not his bag. So even guys who could genuinely have been writers of "Itsy Bitsy" didn't want to. And the composer who eventually did had decidedly mixed feelings about it. After being turned down by Segal, Vance went to Lee Pockriss. He and Vance had had a big hit a couple of years earlier with "Catch A Falling Star" for Perry Como, so Pockriss agreed to compose the music. It's kinda cute – lead vocal with beach-bunny back-up:
It was an Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini
That she wore for the first time today
An Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini
So in the locker she wanted to stayTwo, three, four, stick around, we'll tell you more...
Three decades later, I spent a very pleasant evening with Carolyn Leigh's sister June. Carolyn is one of my all-time favorite lyricists – she wrote "Witchcraft", plus "Young at Heart", "The Best Is Yet to Come", "How Little We Know", a fabulous catalogue of songs. But she was supposedly "difficult" to work with and, after her split with Cy Coleman, she found herself facing a lyric writer's very worst predicament: she didn't have the tunes. And, as Alan Jay Lerner used to say, the first requirement of a great lyric is great music. So, after the glorious first half, the second half of her career was something of a wasteland. She died relatively young, and not long afterwards I found myself up at her sister's place somewhere near Sing-Sing, and late in the evening June asked me if I'd like to hear some of Carolyn's last songs. And she played me a wonderful number - a very vivid and poignant vignette about a boy called Jeremiah, sung from the point of view of a divorced father looking forward to his weekend custody of the child. A very fresh idea for a song in those days, and it never tipped over into mawkishness. And at the end of it I go, "Wow, what a song. Who wrote the tune?"
"Lee Pockriss," says June. "But he wrote 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', so no-one takes him seriously."
So the guy who really wrote "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie" never recovered from it but the guy who didn't write it spends thirty-two years boasting about it to his wife - and she's so impressed she gives an interview to the Associated Press bragging on it. What I found strange about this story is that Paul Vance isn't exactly a household name – he's not Rodgers & Hammerstein – and yet Paul Van Valkenburgh went to the trouble of finding out who wrote the lyrics to "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" without noticing that, as a claim to fame with which to impress one's wife and family, it suffers from one big defect: almost every interview the real Paul Vance has ever given about the song makes plain that it was born from a real-life incident involving his little girl Paula.
The real Mrs Vance had bought their infant daughter the eponymous yellow polka dot bikini and it was on its first outing that summer of 1960. As Paul Vance recalls it, little Paula was (just as the lyric says) reluctant to come out of the locker and when she did (as the lyric goes on to say) she sat huddled up on the beach:
She was afraid to come out in the open
And so a blanket around her she wore
She was afraid to come out in the open
And so she sat bundled up on the shoreTwo, three, four, tell the people what she wore...
Paul Vance looked at what was happening and had one those a-song-is-born moments. Especially when Paula eventually got into the water and the thing fell off, which detail the lyric omits, though it does explain the final verse:
Now she's afraid to come out of the water
And I wonder what she's gonna do
Now she's afraid to come out of the water
And the poor little girl's turning blue...
It was a sixteen-year old passing teen idol called Brian Hyland who made the record, after the company president, Dave Kapp, had been reassured that it wasn't "risqué" but was a perfectly innocent song about a cute little moppet. It got to Number One in August 1960, and young Brian followed it with another Vance/Pockriss novelty number "(The Clickity Clack Song) Four Little Heels". Then he tore up his contract and waited a couple of years until that plaintive summer lament "Sealed With A Kiss" made him a two-hit wonder. But everywhere Paul Vance went in the Sixties he told reporters and disc-jockeys that "Itsy Bitsy" was the true story of his little girl's yellow polka dot bikini. You'd think at some point in the thirty-two years Paul Van Valkenburgh spent passing himself off as Mr Vance's itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow-bellied doppelgänger Mrs Van Valkenburgh might have said, "Hey, you know that daughter of yours you wrote the song about. Do you ever see her?"
Instead, all went smoothly until Mr Van Valkenburgh died, and this time, unlike their various perfumed fantasies about Abu Ghraib or Israel's "disproportionate" response in Lebanon, the Associated Press couldn't wait to disown their original story. Mr Van Valkenburgh's widow gamely refused to concede defeat, saying only that she was "kind of devastated" by the AP and New York Times corrections, but had no reason to doubt her late husband's word. "If this other man says he did it then my husband's a liar, or he's a liar," she told the AP, which was as far as she was prepared to go.
Meanwhile, for an itsy bitsy novelty song "Teenie Weenie" does awfully well. It was in a Yoplait commercial a few years back, and before that in Sister Act 2, and before that Devo did it for Revenge Of The Nerds II. As I understand it, yellow is the most unpopular automobile color, which is why they use it for taxi cabs. But on the Hit Parade it's a different story: no need to wonder where the yellow went, because generally speaking it's rocketing up to the Top Five. Not in the area where one would think it would be most useful – lunar imagery ("The Moon Was Yellow") – but in all kinds of others: "Mellow Yellow", "Yellow River", "Yellow Submarine" and, of course, "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree". That and "Itsy Bitsy" are the two blockbuster yeller sellers, and both are novelty songs. What makes a song a "novelty song"? There are no hard and fast rules, but a good general guide is that – unlike the usual moon/June stuff – it's a situation of no universal application. Another useful indicator is that it's not a lyric evocation of a particular moment but a song about singing a song – in this case, all that "one, two, three, four, tell the people what she wore" stuff. Not to mention the tag, which always reminds me of the McGuire Sisters' marvelous record of "Tiptoe Through The Tulips". As Paul Vance puts it, summing up the entire plot:
From the locker to the blanket
From the blanket to the shore
From the shore to the water
Yes, there isn't any more.
Only there was. From the locker to the blanket to the shore to the water to the morgue and the corrections column of The New York Times. As for Lee Pockriss, every so often I come across that old cassette demo of "Jeremiah" that his lyricist's sister gave me and I regret that the only kid songs anyone wanted from him were about his daughter's lurid bathing suit. "He's writing into the wind," Jule Styne told me, sneeringly, about the composer. But in the wind of posterity "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" hasn't blown away yet.
~Mark will be back right here in a couple of hours with the latest episode of our new Tale for Our Time, The Prisoner of Windsor.
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