Somehow my favorite song as a child came up during a conversation yesterday, and so I listened to it again. It’s “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” whose tune was written in 1907 (by John Bratton) with the immortal words added in 1932 by Jimmy Kennedy. There are many versions on YouTube, including one by Bing Crosby (!), but the one I listened to incessantly as a kid was Rosemary Clooney’s version, here:
I would play it for hours on the 45 rpm version (a “single”) on my tiny record player, and march around the room with my teddy bear, Toasty. I still remember the words after nearly 60 years.
You can see Toasty below. He is exactly as old as I am, having been given to me the day I was born. He’s worn out, lost most of his fur, has had multiple eye replacements, and had his head ripped off (it’s sewn on with obvious stitches, so he looks like Frankenstein). And he has a pair of overalls, made by my mom, to cover his shameful nudity.
His pal, Tiger, to the right, is a Steiff toy that I was given at about age six. Tiger, too, is decrepit, but is in better shape than Toasty. He’s had a horrible eye replacement (see photo), and his squeak box doesn’t work any more. I used to play “Superhero Bear’ with Toasty wearing a cape and riding around on Tiger righting injustices throughout the world.
Toasty and Tiger are always with me in my office, safely ensconced in a bookcase.
I’m not the only aged scientist with an original teddy. As you may remember, Steve Pinker still has his childhood bear Wilfred, whose name was the subject of a contest on this site in 2010.
If you still have your teddy, send me a photo, and I may feature it here.
I had two Steiff felines – a lion and a tiger. I have no idea what happened to them, but I wish I still had them.
I had some Steiff bears, but no longer. I still have a dog w a formerly rattley tail, given to me at age 5 or so by my favorite grandfather. He’s quite the worse for wear, having been snuggled by my own two kids.
Speaking of Teddy Bears’ Picnic, my kids thought the lyrics went “watch them, catch them, underwears…”
Perfect kid interpretation! : )
pS. Are you sure that Toasty’s a bear and not a pig, with those floppy ears? My ex tried to convince me that my bear was in fact a rabbit ( long, floppy ears). He might have been right, but made for much cognitive dissonance after 30 years of being a dog.
Fans of “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” must check out this version by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.
Loved this version too.
This is the definitive version (i.e. the one I remember):
Black screen??
I see a portrait of Henry Hall. Wonderful woodblock playing at 1:30, and an amazing remastering of an 82 year old recording.
So cute! :). I was wondering if Professor Jerry Coyne, and many people on this site, were the cute little kids lined up to take vaccine shots for polio several day ago. Born without hunger, without world war, without civil war, had crazy sex when they were young… What a joyful journey! :))
Yeah but they could still get mumps. 🙂 We’ve got that under control now if the anti-vaxxers don’t screw it all up!
I got the mumps. And the measles. Don’t really remember, though.
I had Rubella but not mumps or measles. A former co-worker had mumps and he remembers it as one of the most horrible things to go through.
All three of my brothers got mumps in the middle of a family cross-country 5?- day train trip. I was maybe 11 and brothers 8, 8, and 4, and I had no symptoms, but got tested many years later and apparently have the antibody. My poor mother…
Remember Whooping Cough also?
Remember concerns about summertime gatherings of kids(especially at public swimming pools) because they might get Polio?
I managed to come down with Chicken Pox on my first day(s) of high school and was out for a week or so.
I got chicken pox on Halloween and couldn’t go out trick or treating:-(.
Boo (in the Halloween and “that sucks” way). I think I got it in the winter time when I was a kid. My friend got it in her 20s & was really sick. It was nothing for me – a headache & some itchiness, though I did scare in spots where I itched too much (one scare is on the bridge of my nose).
Diana – you’ve still got Halloween on the brain: I think you mean scar, not scare- Lol. I think I got one of the types of measles at Easter so coukdn’t go hunting candy, plus the worst was having to lie in a dark room and NOT READ. Even more torture than lack of candy. Oh, what a deprived childhood😂. Woe was me…
Yeah, the boo set the tone for the whole comment. 🙂
Yeah I can’t remember if I had that as a baby but I heard babies with it and it’s horrible. I asked my mom if she just constantly exposed me to germy people because I seemed to have gotten lots of stupid illnesses as an infant.
That’s the way I like to remember it, anyway. 😉
And now we are looking at to live 120 years old! :))
Although the song is for kids, I think it has a delightfully threatening edge to it. It isn’t clear exactly what the teddy bears will do if they catch you watching their picnic, but it sure sounds potentially dangerous — you need to go in disguise, and with company, or better yet, just stay at home while there out there in the woods. It seems like something Roald Dahl would have written.
Kids, schmids! 🙂 I love this Sesame Street song, Lady Bug Picnic. I think The Lady Bug 12 would be a good gang name.
I love the “they talked about the price of furniture and rugs and the high cost of fire insurance for lady bugs”
I love this song too!
Gahan Wilson had a notion of what your teddy bear would do to you if, in your dotage, you venture into the attic where the bear resides, but he didn’t spell it out.
Wonderful! Thank you! Love that song, too.
I had little , ahem , dog many years ago, a Tibetan terrier, named Teddy Bear’s Picnic and called Picnic. Even you, Sir, would have liked him, I think.
You should send this to Rosemary’s nephew, George.
I love the caption on the photo!
“it’s sewn on with obvious stitches, so he looks like Frankenstein”
Nah! He looks more like Frankenstein’s monster to me…
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Pedant!
Of course, there’s a case to be made for calling the creature “Frankenstein”!
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My favourite name for Frankenstein’s creation is “The Wretch” which he is referred to in the book on occasion. I remember this because a friend of mine in university got in trouble for referring to him as such in an essay on the book. That’s stupid that she got in trouble – you can say “The Creature” but not “The Wretch”. It was a TA who marked those papers since it was a first year English course.
How wretched!
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As long as you pronounce it Frankensteen…
Frau Blücher!
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And her knockers…
Oh… you let me down… I was expecting a whinny. 😬
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Don’t know how to embed audio. I thought the knockers were pretty good:-).
Werewolf
There wolf
What hump?
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🐴
You sound a little horse.
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Nay (neighhhhhhh)
A diphthong crime.
🙂
The late Science Fiction author and one-time Big Name Fan Robert Asprin rewrote the lyrics to Teddy Bears’ Picnic with a theme taken from Fritz Leiber’s “Fafhrd the Barbarian” series of stories and novels. Here are the rewritten lyrics:
So interesting! Such a sinister origin to a cute children’s song!
I couldn’t help but sing that in my head when reading it.
The coffee table style photographic book “Much Loved” is a collection of teddy bear photos, of teddy bears that people have had for a long (and sometimes long, long) time. Some are reduced to stains and shreds. But the book is very charming, and I recommend it. Great gift, BTW. Gave it to my partner for Christmas last year, with a note that it reminded me of “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and how it had been loved so hard its fur had come off.
That is really neat. I found a bit about it on the Guardian where you can see pictures of the various bears.
Greg – I downloaded the Kindle version of the book to read on my iPad and it’s fantastic! A whole book of colour photos of people’s bears accompanied by descriptions.
Thanks for pointing this book out!
My favorite song growing up, too! The label on my 45 had cartoons of dancing bears on it, and I would put a many sided mirror in the middle of the record player (it had a little hole for the record player’s bump to go into), and as it revolved, the bears would go dancing around their picnic. Type “red raven mirrored carousel” into google and you’ll see what the mirrored thing looks like.
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I’ve never heard this before, I feel deprived. Peter and the wolf was my music of choice and played it constantly. I still find myself humming it occasionally.
I’m most often reminded of Peter and the Wolf when I hear Grey Butcherbirds calling, because they frequently include a bar or so of the Bird’s theme, a bit off-key and with a manic edge as if the wolf was snapping below their perch.
Yes, I can hear that, too. I think we might have had Peter Ustinov narrating Peter and the Wolf??
Almost certainly.
We also played the hell out of the Broadway Peter Pan, with Mary Martin. We would jump from living room couch to chair while belting “i’m flyyyyyyyyying.” My mother was very patient…
Oh, my version was narrated by Sterling Holloway–I loved it! Tried to find that version when my kids were young, but no luck.
My teddy bear disappeared when my father sold our old caravan with the bear still in it. I never forgave him, probably because he never apologized.
The song I listened to over and over was the Beatles ‘Yellow Submarine’.
Fun post, Professor. I did not know this song as a kid and had only one stuffed bear that I recall – a Smokey-the-Bear with overalls, shared with my brother and long gone.
The Jerry Garcia/David Grisman version of the song (mentioned above) inspired the theme for our daughter’s 3rd birthday party ~17 years ago. Everyone brought a bear or loved substitute, played a couple rounds of bear hide-and-seek and marched around as the music played, etc. Also indoor picnic of something with honey no doubt.
Ah, that reminded me of when my son, Niels, was preschool age and his father & I used to parade around the house with him in the lead, marching and dancing and miming interpretations to the lyrics of his “America’s favorite children’s melodies” recording (not the actual name, but the general idea).
One day when we were rocking out to “When the Saints Come Marching In,” as we were marching past the dining room windows, my husband remarked, “you know, from the outside, no one can see Niels…”
(Niels being way shorter than the window sills, of course.)
LOL! You guys must have been great entertainment for the neighbors!
Just remembered another great record I grew up with, and was able to find on cassette for my kids: Burl Ives.
Old witch, old witch
She lived in a ditch
…….
And when she got mad she wobbled her eyes…
https://www.google.ca/search?q=burl+ives+old+witch&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
That’s a goodie I’ve never heard before! My loss.
You’ll be driving your near and dear crazy by belting out “yes, she wobbled her eyes…” Too bad I forgot about it for Halloween;-)
You’re comment made me remember that old short put on by the National Film Board called The Big Snit. I think it came out in the 80s and I always remembered “you’re shaking your eyes” and of course the nuclear war. I loved the message on the TV which showed an alternating mushroom cloud & sad face.
Love NFB, but not sure how I ever missed this one! Love the shaking eyes ( and the poor kitteh). Remember The Cat Came Back one by NFB?
I have my 68 year old teddy called Theodore. He is too big to be called Teddy. He was given to me by my much older (now late) brother to replace my much loved and battered monkey. So Theodore survived because he was bigger than I was at the time, and I didn’t like him much since he was not Momkey!
My sister and I used to play this song and watch in fascination as it unfailingly prompted my 7-years-younger sister to cry at the point where(in the version we listened to) the singer slowed down at “at six o’clock their mommies and daddies will take them home to bed because they’re tired little teddy bears.” My mom would get furious but we just could not believe that it happened every single time! (Yeah, we were mean older sisters.)
Also, recently we were talking of teddy bears and I mentioned my daughter’s bear. My granddaughter said in amazement, “Wait, Teddy was PINK once??”
How do I send a photo to you Coyne?
To send a photo to *Prof.* Coyne, or *Jerry*, follow the “Research Interests” link at the top right of the page (iirc).
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Apologies, I did not intend to be disrespectful! *Professor Coyne.
Jerry does not like being referred to as Coyne.
Also, if you haven’t yet, it’s a good idea to read “Da Roolz,” which can be found on the sidebar above. 🙂
Steiff has a very good repair shop that fixes broken speech boxes, moldy stuffing, bad stitches, lost eyes and the like even for models discontinued long ago. They also clean the fur. It is not cheap, but there’s almost nothing they can’t do.
What a fun job that would be: Teddy Bear Repair🐻
See Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” here at about the 0:45 mark. The thematic similarity of this music to that of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” is remarkable.
And, with a similar idea, we have “The Hearse Song,” aka “The Worms Crawl In,” here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJppqS8uDyQ
There’s a great wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hearse_Song
Great indeed, in a suitably macabre way. 😀
Loved both recordings, by the way!