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"Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" (also "Faddah") is Allan Sherman's best known song parody. The still-familiar words begin
Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh
Here I am at Camp Granada
Camp is very entertaining
And they say we'll have some fun if it stops raining
The song was first released in 1963 on his LP "My Son, the Nut", and was entirely rewritten for a performance in 1964 on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. In 1965, Swedish/Dutch troubadour Cornelis Vreeswijk translated it loosely into Swedish.
While the words are in the form of a letter, narrating a summer camp experience that alternates between horrifying for the child, and horrifying to the parents, the tune is the sprightly Dance of the Hours by Ponchielli, as seen dramatized with dancing hippos in Disney's 1940 classic Fantasia. The contrast between Sherman's everyman voice, the banal choice of topic, the hilarious imagined situations, and the dignified classical music has kept the tune alive in memory even now, over 40 years later.
Unlike most song parodies, "Hello Muddah" seems to have crossed language and culture boundaries. Cornelis Vreeswijk's Swedish version, "Brevet från kolonien" ("The Letter from Camp"), has passed into folklore, and is still sung by and to children all over Sweden. The song has also been translated into Esperanto and probably other languages. "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" has also been used as the title for a 2003 travelling theatrical revue of Sherman's works.
In 2004, a version of the song beginning "Hello mother, hello father, fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, really bother...", "sung" by a puppy, was used for a television commercial for Bayer AG's K9 Advantix flea control product.
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