100-Year-Old Hit

The little man felt ill at ease.

And said, "Some bread, sir, if you please."

The waiter's voice roared down the hall,

"You gets no bread with ONE MEAT BALL!"

The plaintive ballad about the man who dared ask a wartime waiter for one meat ball is fast becoming a fad with U.S. bobby-soxers. The adolescents have no idea how old-fashioned they are: their latest musical hero was well known to Boston in the 1850s. Almost a century ago, a shy Harvard Latin professor named George Martin Lane tried to buy a single fish ball in a restaurant, heard his piddling order bellowed out by a surly waiter.

The professor preserved his humiliation in a song called The Lone Fish Ball, which was published in Harper's Monthly (1855). It was later plugged by the Harvard boys, taken up by Boston's Irish societies, and even translated into Italian for an opera co-authored by James Russell Lowell. During the Civil War, Union soldiers sang Professor Lane's song as often as doughboys of 1918 sang Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.*

For 70-odd years Fish Ball was kept alive by long-memoried minstrels. Jimmy Savo made the newest recording of the modern version for Decca. But bobby-soxers already knew the recordings of Josh White, Tony Pastor, the Andrews Sisters.

The bouncy music of the old song has been discarded for a minor-keyed tune. The refurbished lyrics are by Songwriter Hy Zaret, who recalls: "I first heard The Lone Fish Ball at a party about a year ago. . . . [It] knocked me over. . . . My version was a lot different . . . but I decided I'd like to use some of the old lines. . . . I'd heard that James Russell Lowell had done a version of it. If Lowell can do it, Hy Zaret can . . . I figured."

* Bigger hits of the Civil War: The Battle Cry of Freedom, Hard Crackers Come Again No More; bigger World War I hits: Over There, Tipperary.

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