The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #57515 Message #2780930
Posted By: Desert Dancer
04-Dec-09 - 06:40 PM
Thread Name: Obit: Larry La Prise (Hokey Pokey/Cokey) 2003
Subject: RE: Obit: Larry La Prise (Hokey Pokey/Cokey) 2003
Robert Degan, who claimed to have authored the Hokey Pokey and sued Larry LaPrise for copyright infringement, has died. The NY Times has some thought on the origins...
Robert Degen, Who Had a Hand in the Hokey Pokey, Dies at 104
By BRUCE WEBER
New York Times, December 3, 2009
Somewhere along the line — at a wedding, at a child's birthday party, in third-grade music class — everybody has done the hokey pokey. Admit it: you sang the silly song, you did the silly dance.
You know the one:
You put your right hand in,
You put your right hand out,
You put your right hand in,
And you shake it all about.
You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around.
That's what it's all about.
Popular as the song is, its authorship has long been in dispute, with the credit usually going to Larry LaPrise, who as part of a musical group, the Ram Trio, is said to have created it in Sun Valley, Idaho, as a novelty number to entertain vacationing skiers. The trio, whose other members were Charles Peter Macak and Tafft Baker, recorded the song, "The Hokey Pokey," in the late 1940s.
There are many reasons to question this version of the song's provenance, however. Among them is that a very similar song, "The Hokey Pokey Dance," was copyrighted a few years earlier, in 1944, by a club musician from Scranton, Pa., named Robert Degen. Mr. Degen — who claimed for decades that Mr. LaPrise had stolen his song — died in Lexington, Ky., on Nov. 23, his 104th birthday. (Mr. LaPrise died in 1996, and the two men never met.)
Mr. Degen's death was confirmed by his son William.
Working as a full-time musician before World War II, Mr. Degen played guitar and banjo with different bands in clubs and restaurants and at parties in and around Scranton. For a while in the 1920s he belonged to the Scranton Sirens, a jazz ensemble that at one time featured both Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. He was not a full-time composer and did not copyright any other songs, his son said, adding that his father wrote "The Hokey Pokey Dance" with a musician friend, Joe Brier, while playing for the summer at a resort near the Delaware Water Gap.
The Degen-Brier version is rhythmically similar to the LaPrise version, though the melody is somewhat different. The lyrics of the opening verse are as follows:
Put your right hand in,
Put your right hand out,
Put your right hand in and you wiggle all about.
Everything is okey dokey when you do the Hokey Pokey.
That is what the dance is all about.
However, neither version may be the original. A similar song, called variously "Hokey Cokey" or "Cokey Cokey," was reportedly a favorite of English and American soldiers in England during World War II, the authorship attributed sometimes to a popular Northern Irish songwriter, Jimmy Kennedy, and sometimes to a London bandleader, Al Tabor.
Some Roman Catholic churchmen, meanwhile, have said that the words "hokey pokey" derive from "hocus pocus" — the Oxford English Dictionary concurs — and that the song was written by 18th-century Puritans to mock the language of the Latin Mass. Last year the Catholic Church in Scotland, concerned that some soccer fans were using the song as a taunt, raised the possibility that singing it should be prosecuted as a hate crime.
"This song does have quite disturbing origins," Peter Kearney, a spokesman for Cardinal Keith O'Brien, who leads the Catholic Church in Scotland, was widely quoted in Britain as saying. He added, "If there are moves to restore its more malevolent meaning, then consideration should perhaps be given to its wider use."
In any case the song and dance became a popular phenomenon in the United States after the LaPrise version, arranged for a big band, was recorded by Ray Anthony and his orchestra and released in 1953 as the B side of another novelty song, "Bunny Hop." By the mid-1950s it was known by every child in the nation, and in 1956 Mr. Degen and Mr. Brier, who died in 1991, filed suit against the members of the Ram Trio and several record companies and music publishers for copyright infringement, asking for $200,000 in damages and $1 for each record of the LaPrise "Hokey Pokey."
The suit was settled out of court, evidently in such a way that the two sets of authors would share ownership. Mr. LaPrise later sold the rights to his version to Acuff-Rose Music, a Nashville publishing company, started by the singer Roy Acuff, that was sold to Sony/ATV Music Publishing in 2002. William Degen said his father received regular royalty payments from Sony/ATV through his lawyer, Donald Lowry, and supplied a copy of a Sony/ATV check for $47,199.25 written to Mr. Lowry in March 2005. A spokesman for Sony/ATV, Marc Wood, said in an e-mail message that any agreement between the company and Mr. Degen was confidential. Attempts to reach Mr. Lowry were unsuccessful.
Robert Matthew Degen was born in Scranton on Nov. 23, 1905. His father was a farmer. He briefly attended a local business college before settling on music to make a living. After World War II, Mr. Degen gave up his full-time music career and worked as a furniture salesman until his retirement in 1970. He subsequently moved to Lexington, where his brother was then living.
In addition to his son William, who lives in Lexington, he is survived by his wife of 74 years, Vivian; a second son, Robert, a jazz musician who lives in Frankfurt, Germany; a grandson; and two great-grandchildren.