The Thing

Give pop music fans a song they can wigwag, boom or clomp to (e.g., Down by the Old Mill Stream, Deep in the Heart of Texas'), and a national contagion is started. Last week RCA Victor had a husky little new number in the boom division called The Thing. It had sold 400,000 copies in ten days, an alltime Victor high, and was spreading like German measles.

The Thing had an inexorable calliope-style tune, utterly undistinguished and not even new. Charles Grean of RCA Victor's own popular records staff had merely borrowed the tune of a Rabelaisian old ditty called The Tailor's Boy, and given it new lyrics. The teaser: Grean's storytelling lyrics never do specify what "the thing" is; they just pause while Singer Phil Harris suggestively waits for three resounding booms of the bass drum. Sample:

7 wandered all around the town until I chanced to meet

A hobo who was looking for a handout on the street.

He said he'd take most any old thing, he was a desperate man,

But when I showed him the (boom boom-boom) he turned around and ran.*

What in the world was the thing? Pop music fans didn't care, so long as they could come in with the bass drum.

* Copyright, 1950, Hollis Music, Inc.

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