[This week my
sons return for their second stay at an overnight camp. That gives me serious
empty nest syndrome, but more relevantly it also gives us an opportunity for
some Summer CampStudying! Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the summer
camp experiences, stories, and perspectives of fellow AmericanStudiers.]
On the very
American afterlife of a classic camp (sorry) song.
In 1963, comedy
writer and TV producer Allan
Sherman wrote (along with musician and songwriter Lou Busch) the comic
novelty song “Hello
Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp).” The hyperbolic lyrics were
based on the less-than-ideal experiences of Sherman’s son Robert at New York’s
Camp Champlain (Robert had such a miserable camp
experience that he was eventually expelled!), and captured pitch-perfectly
both the exaggerations and extremes (and vicissitudes) of a young person’s
perspective and the mythic presence of summer camp in our childhood and
national imagination. The song was such a hit (occupying the #2 spot on the Billboard singles list for three August
weeks) that Sherman wrote
and performed a sequel on the Tonight
Show with Johnny Carson less than a year later, cementing the song’s status
as the nation’s unofficial summer camp anthem.
It was in 1965,
however, that the multi-faceted American story of “Hello Muddah” began to
unfold in full. In that year Milton Bradley released a Camp Granada board
game, advertised by a
TV commercial featuring yet another version of the song performed by
Sherman himself. Moreover, the 1965-66 TV schedule featured the first and only
season of Camp Runamuck, an NBC sitcom based
on the song (including character names and plot details drawn from the lyrics).
Those cultural and material extensions of the song have been amplified, in the
decades since, by a
children’s book, an acclaimed Off-Broadway
musical revue, and numerous pop
culture allusions and references.
Indeed, while the original version of the song continues to exist (even in the
pre-YouTube days of my childhood I remember hearing it somewhere), it’s fair to
say that “Hello Muddah” has become in many ways more of a brand than a text,
revised and reframed and made new for all these distinct cultural and
commercial purposes.
That process, by
which an individual and isolated artistic work gets adopted into the
multi-faceted, multi-media mélange that is American popular culture and
society, is anything but new, as my Dad’s pioneering website Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and American Culture makes clear. But as that website
itself illustrates, this kind of American cultural evolution has become
significantly more visible, and more exactly recordable and traceable, in our
21st century digital moment. I won’t lie, I didn’t know anything
about the “Hello Muddah” board game and TV show until I started researching
this post—but now they, like the many permutations of the song itself (which I
have a dim memory of singing during my own, thankfully far less extreme and far
more positive, experience at Virginia’s overnight Camp Friendship as a middle
schooler in the late 1980s), have become part of my own evolving American
perspective and identity.
Next camp
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Summer camp stories you’d share or histories you’d highlight?
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