Responding to a Substack item about old state songs, I cited my earlier discussion of Okla’s horrible song, which was blessedly replaced by Rogers and Hammerstein.

Got me thinking. Were those horrible songs meant as parodies? My father used to sing the song in parodic style, imitating a warbly offkey church soprano.

Home on the Range would fit the model. Where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day. That was NOT the daily life of pioneers.

A few months ago I listened closely to Anacreon in Heaven and then compared it with the Star-spangled Banner. Anacreon was wildly bawdy and openly obscene. Key used the tune AND some of the words of Anacreon, marking his song as a specific reference to the original.

Yankee Doodle is already recognized as a bawdy parody. The Brits made it up to mock the Yanks, and the Yanks happily adopted it. Get it up and with the girls be handy. Pretty damn obvious.

The horrible Okla song talks about vintage thick on the vine and ends with the worst line in all of musical history:

Tis a toast we all can quaff.

At the time when it was adopted, Okla was officially dry, and there have never been vineyards in Okla. I assumed that the schoolmarm author was naively ignoring these plain facts, but maybe not. Those old Okie ladies were HARDASS.