Dunderbeck (Bedroom Demo #274)

Terry Scott Taylor

presents

Short, Sweet, and Stupid

A compendium of old and obscure novelty tunes

guaranteed to get in your head at night in bed and make you

regret the day you were born.

"Dunderbeck"

music and lyrics: Traditional

La la la la la la la la la la la la la

Oh Dunderbeck, Oh Dunderbeck

How could you be so mean?!

I’m sorry you invented such a wonderful machine

For dogs and cats and long-tailed rats

Will never more be seen

‘For they’ll all be ground to sausage meat

In Dunderbeck’s machine!

La la la la la la la la la la la la la

Once there was a dutchman. his name was Dunderbeck

He was fond of sausage meat, sauerkraut, and speck

He owned a great big butcher store; the finest ever seen

And he took out a patent on a sausage meat machine

chorus

One day there was a little boy who came into the store

To buy a pound of sausage meat that he laid upon the floor

And while the boy was waiting he whistled up a tune

And the sausages, they all got up And dan red around the room

chorus

One night there was a problem, the ma chine it would not go

Dunderbeck, he climbed inside, the reason for to know

His wife, she had a nightmare in the middle of her sleep

She gave the crank a terrible yank and Dunderbeck was meat!

chorus

guitar and vocal: T.S. Taylor

chorus vocals: T.S. Taylor, Deborah Taylor, and Noel Ferro

note:

My research on this gruesomely happy little ditty produced very little in the way of it’s history beyond the fact that the author is unknown and that the song appeared in print late in the 19th century. There has been some speculation down through the years that the song was inspired by an actual murder, a quite bloody and gruesome one at that, but no one is certain of this.

There are currently a good number of first-hand accounts of people around my age attesting to the fact that they remember this song being sung to them when they were youngsters by various members of their family (grandfathers, grandmothers, etc). I must confess that in my last introductory note to this series, I had a brain-fart when I stated that it was my father who taught these ridiculous little tunes. While this is partially true, I forgot to mention that my mother, grandmother, and grandfather were also contributors. Dunderbeck was most often sung to me primarily by my mother who learned it from her mother. Mom was the one who passed it on to my daughter who has been singing it to her young daughters for some time now. I assume this tradition will keep going until the Lord returns. Dunderbeck has also been a favorite Campfire song for as far back as anyone can remember. Apparently the lyric “terrible yank!” is said to have been shouted with great gusto by many a Boy and Girl Scout down through the years.

There are a number of versions of Dunderbeck, distinguishable by some slight lyrical variations here and there. Also, some versions start with the chorus while others start with the first verse. The details and the plot of the story itself, however, remain essentially the same in every version.

I told you in the opening lines of this note that in my research I didn’t discover much about the historical origins of Dunderbeck, but I would be committing a grave sin of omission if I didn't come clean in making a really embarrassing confession; in all the years that my family has been singing Dunderbeck we have been making an egregious error for which there is little excuse. Let me just come out and say it: In the many years we’ve been passing this cherished, rather ghoulish little number down to other family members, generation to generation, well, we’ve…we’ve….had Dunderbeck’s name all wrong! It wasn't until I did my search that I discovered we’d been calling the central character of the story Dun-Duh-Beck, not Dun-Der-beck! That's right, Dundabeck. Let me tell you, it broke my heart to break this to the family. At first they gasped, then they denied it was true, then they got really angry with me. Now they’re in mourning and I don’t think they’ll ever recover.