In 1962, a man named Allan Sherman came almost out of nowhere to become, for a brief time, the biggest name in comedy records. As a purveyor of funny song parodies, he remains unmatched, and his rags-to-riches tale is one of the great show business success stories.
Born Allan Copelon in Chicago on November 30, 1924, the man who would later be known as Allan Sherman endured a rocky childhood. His father was a race car driver and an entrepreneur in questionable businesses who walked out on the family when Allan was six. His mother (whose maiden name of Sherman he later assumed) was a "flapper" who was perpetually moving from city to city, occasionally parking young Allan with other relatives for months at a time while she tried to set up her life in some new town. All in all, he attended twenty-one different schools. After flunking out of college and being discharged from the Army for health reasons, he went to New York (arriving on V-J Day in 1945) with aspirations of becoming a top songwriter and/or performer. He eventually achieved both but it took a while.
At first, no one wanted his songs — or the hilarious song parodies he liked to sing at parties — and the only work he could procure was as a lower-tier comedy writer on radio shows and eventually in early television. That he was able to secure those had a lot to do with a gag file that he and his then-new bride, Dee, compiled. They clipped gags out of joke books and old magazines and pasted them in scrapbooks categorized by subject. Sherman later said that his tenure on some writing jobs lasted as long as his file on the show's topic held out.
For a long time, he seemed to be setting some sort of record for being hastily fired from each new position. Then in 1950, he and a writer friend, Howard Merrill, sold a game show idea to Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, television's most successful producers of such programs. Industry legend has it that when Sherman and Merrill pitched the idea, Goodson and Todman replied that it was a blatant copy of their hit show, What's My Line? and Sherman responded, "Well, you might as well imitate your own program because if you don't, someone else will." Somehow, that logic appealed to the producers because a year later, the show — entitled I've Got a Secret — debuted on CBS. 1951 was also when he recorded his first (and for ten years, only) comedy record, singing two of the silly songs he liked to sing at parties. The record did not succeed but, happily for the Sherman family, the game show did. It became a long-running hit and he stayed with it, eventually moving up to the title of Producer.
In the mid-fifties, Sherman began to write and produce TV specials in his spare time, winning much acclaim while continuing to produce I've Got a Secret. This caused Goodson-Todman to increasingly believe he was spreading himself too thin and in 1958, he was fired from the show he'd co-created. He immediately resumed his old pattern of going from job to job, never holding one for very long. During this time, he explored several possible routes into performing but none succeeded. He was well known within the entertainment industry for performing at parties but that was as far as his gift for parodies took him.
In 1961, he moved to Los Angeles to produce the short-lived game show, Your Surprise Package. When it was cancelled, he managed to secure a job as the Producer of a new talk show Steve Allen was doing for the Westinghouse Broadcast Group. In one of the more embarrassing show business firings of its day, Sherman managed to get terminated before the show debuted, and he spent many months looking for work and not finding it. The saving grace was that, as in New York, he had become the darling of the Show Biz Party crowd. His next door neighbor was Harpo Marx, and both Harpo and Steve Allen kept getting Sherman invited to parties and encouraging him to sing his song parodies. With encouragement from party-goers like Jack Benny and Jerry Lewis, he began shopping his songs around to record companies…but his biggest boosters were Hollywood agent Bullets Durgom, and a composer-arranger-record company exec named Lou Busch. Busch had the musical abilities that Sherman lacked and was able to take his lyrics and turn them into recordable songs. In '62, Warner Brothers Records agreed to put out an album of those songs.
Sherman later said he wrote the first record in three weeks, but some of the tunes appear to have been ones he'd performed at parties for years. Several comedy writers would later claim to have helped or outright ghosted much of his material, including for the first album — an assertion Sherman denied. He did receive major assistance from the music skills of Lou Busch, called by some the "unsung hero" of Allan Sherman's stardom. Among other contributions, Busch was responsible for the deadpan nature of the accompaniment. Lush, serious arrangements only made Sherman's silly lyrics and untrained voice seem funnier.
My Son, the Folk Singer was released in October and quickly became one of the fastest-selling records in history. His success would last less than ten years but it would leave behind a number of very funny records. He passed away in 1973. Today would have been his 90th birthday.
I never met Mr. Sherman and in a way, I'm kinda glad. The one distant contact we had was unpleasant and I've since met a lot of folks who knew him and didn't get along with him in the way I would have wanted to. Still, his work meant so much to me that I have nothing but good thoughts about the man. And when a reader of this site, Derek Tague, messaged me that today Sherman would have been 90, I felt I oughta say something. He deserves to be more remembered than he is.