The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #1642   Message #3170715
Posted By: GUEST,dvandorn
14-Jun-11 - 07:45 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Pinkham Compound / Lydia Pinkham
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Pinkham Compound / Lydia Pinkham
There was an album I had a copy of in college 35 years ago, that was at least 5 years old by then, which included the Lydia Pinkham song as well as a version of Yankee Doodle with the original British lyrics, a somewhat Americanized version of Robert Burns' Yellow, Yellow Yorlin, the Ballad of Dead-Eye Dick, the Ropey Squadron (a Vietnam-era version of What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor), the Humoresque with lyrics inspired by the signs in railroad coaches that gentlemen will please refrain from flushing toilets... and many more.

The name of the album was (as best I can recall) Songs Found Written on the Walls of the Washroom at the Library of Congress, subtitled Project of the Society for the Preservation of Scatalogical Materials. One of the primary performers was (or at least sounded *exactly* like) the man who sang the songs in the original cartoon version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Imagine the same voice that sang "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch!" singing "Master Brown had very small testes, they were just like a couple of peas, so he took, he swallowed, he gargled some vegetable compound, now they hang below his knees!"

No matter what I do, I cannot seem to find any trace of this album anywhere on the internet. No discussion of it, no remembrance of it, no references to it at all. I would have thought this discussion of the Ode to Lydia Pinkham would have referenced it. If it's any help, the version of Lydia Pinkham on this album used the following chorus variant:

And we'll sing, we'll sing, we'll sing of Lydia Pinkham!
And her love, her love, her love for the human race!
(Human race!)
How she makes, she bottles, she sells her Vegetable Compound!
And the papers, they publish her face!

Note the grace-note words tossed in to achieve the desired scansion (especially the word 'they' in the last line of the chorus). That should make this version rather unique and memorable -- but none of the versions I see of the lyric include them.

Anyone recall this album? At all? Or should I be looking for the portal back into my own, native dimension where this album exists?