Lyr Add: Talking Undertaker Blues

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Talking Undertaker Blues
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 18 Mar 23 - 06:15 PM

The above song is properly titled TALKING SOCIALIZED ANTI-UNDERTAKER BLUES, and it was written by Patrick Sky, ©1965 by Whitfield Music Inc.

It appeared on the various-artists compilation album "Singer Songwriter Project," 1965.

The lyrics were printed with the notation "Salty Dog chord progression" in Broadside: The National Topical Song Magazine, Issue 60, July 15, 1965, page 6, which you can see in PDF format here. The lyrics are not identical to those above, but close enough; the differences are those you'd expect when the song has been folk-processed (i.e. misremembered) a bit -- a different dollar amount in verse 5, for example.

Our old friend Catspaw49 posted the his version of the lyrics in a joke thread here on 23-May-1999, and I'll bet that's where Dave Oesterreich got them.

Subject: Lyr Add: TALKING UNDERTAKER BLUES
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 15 Oct 00 - 03:23 PM

TALKING UNDERTAKER BLUES

Now I'm just a plain old country hick,
And I don't mean to make you sick,
But I got a few words that I'd like to say.
It's about this undertaker man
Who told me that he had a plan
To put me in the ground on Lay-A-Way.

Well it all started couple year ago
When I met this doctor in O-Hi-O
Who told me that I really had it bad.
He said, "Son, your veins is turning blue
And emphysema is a-killing you."
And said, at most, three months is all I had.

Now friends as you can plainly see,
That scared the HELL right outa' me
And for a month or so I really had the blues.
Then one fine day I took a look
And sure enough in my phone book
I saw this sign that says, "Come in and Choose."

"Joe's Undertaker's ..We have lots
Of coffins, grass, and burial plots,
We fix faces back the way they came.
Formaldehyde and alcohol
We'll pickle you, one and all
Black or white, to us you're all the same."

So I went in and sat right down
And pretty soon this man came 'round
Said he'd like to take some measurements.
So I looks at him and says, "Okay."
He starts to measurin' right away,
Measures up sixty-three hundred dollars and nineteen cents!

Now friends, as you can plainly see,
I'm as healthy as any boy could be.
And that doctor, he just sits and wonders why.
So I look at him and I say, "Doc,"
"I know this comes as quite a shock,
But the truth is, I just can't afford to die!"

DRO

Frankly, I don't know where I got this. I don't find it in the DT. Maybe it's copyrighted or maybe it's not.

Dave Oesterreich