Sheldon Allman's Plutonium-Based Folk Songs

Sheldon Allman had a career in show biz that few have equalled As a voice actor and songwriter, he provided the singing voice for Mister Ed, and wrote the two Mr. Ed songs featured in the episode Ed The Songwriter. He also wrote the theme song to the animated TV show, Jay Ward's George of the Jungle, and had parts in numerous TV shows and movies in the 50's and 60's, from The Fugitive to In Cold Blood. His most memorable role was as one of the two aliens in The Twilight Zone episode, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

In 1960, Allman released an album of demented cold war novelty songs called Folks Songs For the 21st Century. I found out about it on the tremendous Bear Family boxed set Atomic Platters (which also included a track by Janet Greene, The "Anti-Baez"). Out of the five CDs in the collection, Allman's two tracks were standouts for me: Crawl Out Through The Fallout and Radioactive Mama (MP3s).

Here's the Sheldon Allman page on the great Conelrad site, for all you fans of Ducking and Covering.

Comments

[protogenes]

Hahahaha! I am amused

[Kip W]

Speaking of Mr. Ed and singing, there's an absolutely excruciating Golden LP called "Straight From The Horse's Mouth" out there. My copy was a gift from a dumpster-diving friend (who later decided to end the friendship after I insisted on playing the album one day). It's by Paul Parnes, who seems to have made a career of writing character-based albums for Golden Records. The kicker is that the voice isn't even Mr. Ed. I don't think it's even a real horse -- it's probably some guy named Mike Henry, who has a deep and insinuating voice that wraps itself peculiarly around some wo-o-o-ords, based (I think) on where they fall in a sentence.

It starts off well enough, with a xylophone-heavy rendition of the show's theme, but after that, it's full of tedious anecdotes, and stuffed with "facts" that are boring, outdated, or just plain wrong. The heart of it is the songs, many of them Gilbert & Sullivan tunes rigged up with new words, presenting a cavalcade of further "facts" like how many kinds of animals there are, or how many styles of hats. It's on my iPod, though I haven't had the urge to listen to it in a while.

It finishes, satisfyingly, with "Ed" being blasted off into outer space, protesting, "But I'm not a monkey! How do I know if somebody up there li-i-i-ikes me?"

[Ron D]

Crawlout through the fallout baby...

This record has alot of gems on it.

[Ken Sims]

I'm the 4th poster...do I win anything?!

[Thierry]

Produced by David Axelrod, too!