Gumbo

The piece begins with a wolf call, and ends with all the instruments thrown into a corner. It is scored for ukulele, kazoo, hogan-twanger (wooden box and hacksaw blades), cardboard box, seal barks and an Indian elephant bell. It has words like this:

The boy I mean was oh-so peachy-keen,

A real gone guy from Goneville.

He was scattyboo and oogledy-too,

And he lived in Pasahogan.

The title of the piece spells Nature's Boy backwards. By last week Serutan Yob had sold 350,000 records, and Capitol was threatening to make at least a million.

The man responsible for all this oogledy-too is a deliberately foolish-looking band leader called Red Ingle (real name: Ernest Jansen). It all began, he says, when he and his band, the Natural Seven, were playing in a Los Angeles nightclub. One night his vocalist, Karen Tedder, complained that if she had to sing Eden Ahbez' Nature Boy once again, she would go mad. To prove her point, she went into a wacky burlesque of it. "Well," said Red, "sing it that way." She did; and every night the boys put in a few more burps and barks. When they decided to record it, they picked out "instruments" they were sure Petrillo had never thought of banning.

When he isn't mugging in public, Red Ingle assures everyone he knows that his one ambition is to get out of the band business. He tried retiring in 1942 by going into the CAA. A year later, Spike Jones lured him away with a job ("I did the whoopees and coughs in Cocktails for Two"). In 1946, he tried retiring again. But one day some cronies dropped around to his house, and before he knew it, they had whipped up a burlesque of the mournful perennial, Temptation. Red's Tim-Tayshun sold a million records, and Red found himself in business again.

Since then, he and the Natural Seven have inflicted on the nation Pagan Ninny's Keep 'Er Goin' Stomp (from Violinist Paganini's Perpetual Motion), Moe Zart's Turkey Trot, Cigareetes, Whuskey, and Wild, Wild Women, and such publicity stunts as advertising for an ugly vocalist ("preferably with two heads. Neither must be attractive"). Through it all, Red has been miserable. Now things are going so well, he doubts if he'll ever get out of the band business. Says he: "It's like gumbo in the spring. You just can't shake it off your shoes."

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