[78-L] Oompah question (sort of)

[Michael Shoshani]

On 01/24/2012 11:18 AM, David Lennick wrote:
>
> My CBC producers and I spent ages on the telephone and researching elsewhere,
> trying to find the source of "There's a town in France" when Peter Schickele
> quoted it in one of his pastiche works. It seems to date from a pre-1900
> World's Fair and the snake charmer or can shaker or something like that. No,
> not from Saint-Saens' Bacchanale.

The general, if perhaps not completely bought-into, consensus is that 
the melody originated with future Congressman Sol Bloom at the 1893 
Chicago World's Fair. Wackyplodia says the earliest recording of the 
melody (as "The Streets of Cairo") was performed by Dan Quinn on 
Berliner 171-Z.

The other question that was asked, Oompah Oompah stick it up your 
jumper...no idea where that hails from, but that's one of the nonsense 
lines chanted by the singers during the ending of the very post-78 "I Am 
The Walrus".

MS