Fairy Tales For The Hip Set

 by whiteray

I was less than a month old when my grandfather went out to buy a record of nursery rhymes for my sister, who was turning three in 1953. I’m not sure where Grandpa went to buy the record – that detail has been lost in the family mythology. But he found a 45 rpm record that had “Little Red Riding Hood” on one side and “Three Little Pigs” on the other, read by Al “Jazzbo” Collins. Satisfied, he paid – I suppose – something less than fifty cents and took it back to the apartment where we lived. 

Sometime during my sister’s birthday celebration, I imagine, Grandpa produced the record, and my dad plopped it in the record player – one in a black plastic case that played 45s only, the same one on which my sister and I would play our first Beatles record ten-and-a-half years later. There came a riff of jazz piano . . . and then: 

Well now, little ones . . . Once upon a time in the land of Ooh-Blah-Dee there lived a fine chick named Red Riding Hood. One day, Red’s mother said ‘Honey, your grandma is feeling the least . . .” 

What Grandpa had found at the local record store was one of the great novelty records of the early 1950s. According to the September 14, 1953, edition of Time magazine, Al “Jazzbo” Collins, a Manhattan disk jockey, had found two hip reworkings of Grimms’ fairy tales in Down Beat magazine. The tales, written by TV personality Steve Allen, had been intended, Time said, “only as a private joke for bopsters, told in the latest Tin Pan Alley argot, where ‘cool’ means good, ‘crazy’ means wonderful and anything that is really tops is simply called ‘the most.’” 

The tales, Time said, “quickly reached a larger public” when Collins read them over the air, then recorded them for Brunswick. “The record,” Time noted, “has sold a reported 200,000 copies to become a solid popular hit.” 

Time quoted the conversation between Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, masquerading as Red Riding Hood’s grandmother: 

“Grandma, what frantic eyes you have,” said Red Riding Hood. 

“The better to dig you with, my dear,” said the wolf. 

“And Grandma, what a long nose you have.” 

“Yeah,” said the wolf, “it’s a gasser.” 

The flip side, with the tale of the Three Little Pigs, was more of the same, filled with hip slang and cultural references. 

My grandfather, my mother told me once, was unhappy. He thought he’d failed. Well, he may not have come up with the fairy tales that would have suited my sister at the age of three. But he inadvertently left us with a classic relic of the early 1950s. The 45 is a little battered, and it’s got some pops and hisses, but it plays pretty well, although since I recorded it some years ago, it’s been retired in a new paper sleeve. Its simple survival is remarkable, given the haphazard handling it received in our basement playroom, where it was stacked with other records – none of which aged nearly as well – and was no doubt dropped on the floor and generally mistreated over the years. 

I remember listening to the record over and over again when I was about ten. I didn’t understand that it was a spoof of a culture that was securely lodged in the decade I was born, but I loved the lingo and the dry wit that I could – being at least a little precocious – appreciate a little. Still, having listened to the two tales several times since I rescued the record when Mom was selling the house almost twenty years ago, I know now that as a child, I didn’t get all of Allen’s and Collins’ references.

But even if I didn’t understand it all back then, some of it still connected. I remember giggling time and again with my best friend over the ending to “Three Little Pigs.” When the surviving pig lifts the lid off the pot in which he’s simmered the Big Bad Wolf, he inhales the aroma of the result and proclaims, “Ah, my favorite soup: Cream of Nowhere!”

Here’ “Three Little Pigs.”

And here's “Little Red Riding Hood.”