US musical satirist Tom Lehrer dies at 97

West Australian

8 hours ago

Tom Lehrer, the math prodigy who became an influential musical satirist with his barbed views of American social and political life in the 1950s and 1960s, has died at the age of 97, according to news reports.
Lehrer died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday, his longtime friend David Herder told the New York Times. No cause of death was specified.
Lehrer's career as a musician and revered social commentator was little more than a happy accident that began with composing ditties to amuse classmates at Harvard University. His heyday lasted about seven years and, by his own count, produced only 37 songs before the reluctant performer returned to teaching at Harvard and other universities.
"There's never been anyone like him," Cameron Mackintosh, the Broadway producer who created Tom Foolery, a revue of Lehrer songs, told BuzzFeed in 2014.
"Of all famous songwriters, he's probably the only one that ... is an amateur in that he never wanted to be professional. And yet the work he did is of the highest quality of any great songwriter."
As the US nestled into the post-war complacency of the 1950s, the liberal-leaning Lehrer was poking holes in the culture with his songs while maintaining an urbane, witty air.
Some of his works reflected his mathematical interests - New Math about subtracting 173 from 342 and Lobachevsky about a 19th-century Russian mathematician - but his meatier songs were deemed by some to be too irreverent and shocking. In 1959 Time magazine lumped him in with groundbreaking comics Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl as "sicknicks" who had "a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world."
The song I Wanna Go Back to Dixie looked at racism in the South ("The land of the boll weevil where the laws are medieval") while National Brotherhood Week took on hypocrites ("It's only for a week so have no fear/ Be nice to people who are inferior to you"). Be Prepared exposed the dark side of a Boy Scout's life, I Got It from Agnes was about venereal disease, and We Will All Go Together When We Go addressed nuclear Armageddon.
"If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while," Lehrer wrote on the notes that accompanied one of his albums.
Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born on April 9, 1928, in New York. He grew up in the Big Apple listening to musical theatre and one of his first works was The Elements, a recitation of the periodic table set to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. He enrolled at Harvard at age 15 and his Fight Fiercely, Harvard with the line "Won't it be peachy if we win the game?" became a popular spoof of the school's sports fight song.
After serving in the US Army from 1955 to 1957, Lehrer began performing and recorded more albums but was losing his zest for music. By the early 1960s, working on his doctorate - which he never finished - and teaching became greater concerns, although he did contribute songs to the TV news satire show That Was the Week That Was in 1963 and 1964.