They Might Be Giants use the tune in “Istanbul” for the line “Even old New York was once New Amsterdam.”Ī more recent quotation - “Who’s That? Brooown!” by Das Racist: Steve Martin uses the melody at the beginning of “ King Tut.” (no embedding.) The Egyptian melody also gets quoted a lot in performances of “ Sheik of Araby,” for example as performed here by the Beatles for their unsuccessful Decca audition in 1962. Who knows if the tune in Arban’s book is an actual middle eastern folk song, or a European mutation of “Kradoutja,” or what. The tune is related to an Arabic or Algerian melody called “ Kradoutja” that had been circulating around France since the 1600s. The Egyptian melody appears in the widely-studied Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method For Trumpet from 1864, under the title “Arabian Song.” Arban almost certainly didn’t write it it’s one of many “representative ethnic songs” in the book learned from the folk tradition. The melody was copyrighted under various names early in the 20th century, including “Dance Of The Midway,” “Coochi-Coochi Polka” and “The Streets Of Cairo.” (Thank you, Eunji Choi, for pointing me to this last tune’s Wikipedia page.) The tune has been known in America as the “hookie-kookie dance” or the “hoochie-coochie dance.” It came to fame when it accompanied a belly dancer at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and afterwards it became something of a hit. When the snake is dead they put flowers on its head. On the planet Mars all the women smoke cigars.Įvery puff they take is enough to kill a snake. He quotes different sets of lyrics, such as:Īll the girls in France do the hokey pokey dance,Īnd the way they shake is enough to kill a snake The context is a discussion of a Louis Armstrong recording from 1928 called “Tight Like This.” Listen at 2:04 as Louis quotes the “Egyptian” melody and varies it a few times.īenzon knows the Egyptian melody from childhood. You can find an excellent capsule history of it in William Benzon’s book Beethoven’s Anvil. It turns out to be hundreds of years of old, and goes by many different names. I’ve always wondered where the Egyptian melody came from. Here’s a kid playing it on bass clarinet: It's also a nice tune to play on the piccolo.I know this melody as the cartoon snakecharmer song. Some of these lyrics may have been inspired by the French music hall dancers of the time, who were known for the French Can-can. Over the years, people have put a variety of their own comedic lyrics to this familiar song, like the famous “There's a place in France where the ladies wear no pants”. Even famous composer Irving Berlin reportedly used the popular melody in his song, “Harem Nights”. The piece was also used as a basis for several songs in the early 20th century: “Hoolah! Hoolah!”, “Dance of the Midway”, “Coochi-Coochi Polka”, “Danse Du Ventre”, “Kutchi Kutchi”. The first five notes of the song are similar to the beginning of a 1719 French song named “Colin prend sa hotte”, which in turn resembles note for note an Algerian or Arabic song titled “Kradoutja”. It included an attraction called “A Street in Cairo” which featured snake charmers, camel rides and a belly dancer known as Little Egypt. Congressman) who was the entertainment director of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. The piece originally was purportedly written by Sol Bloom, a showman (and later, a U.S. This is the song that cartoons on television inevitably play every time they feature either a belly dancer or a snake charmer.
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