A friend was regaling me with a Billy Connolly song (the Welly boot song) in fairly good imitation accent, but he hadn’t a clue it was a parody; he’d never heard “The Work of the Weavers” which I haven’t heard anyone sing for years, though I think those lyrics are in Rise Up Singing.

There was a period when the “Anti-Garden Song” was more popular than Mallet’s original lyrics, and some folks learned it through aural tradition in ignorance of the original. I know I heard Clancy & Makem’s “Galway Bay” before I heard the original lyrics, though I suspected there was some joke to it, by audience response, as well.

I can easily picture people being ignorant that a well-written parody is not the original, as the best parodies have enough inherent humor & good content on their own, when it’s in a genre you’re unfamiliar with. If Weird Al has recorded it, that’s a dead giveaway, but there is such an uptick in people writing parodies these days, particularly political ones, I might not catch one if it’s not based on something traditional.

Joanne in Cleveland
(Whose “A list” parodies are mostly by Les Barker)