Song: Ten Hard Smacks (and parodies in general)

My recently posted song lyrics "Ten hard Smacks" is based on the song "Ten Long years" as performed by the folk/rock band Steeleye Span, and it appears on their album _Tonight's the Night_. The lyrics may be found at https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/steeleye-span/ten-long-years-68

The first verse and chorus go:

The judge he said of an innocent man
Give him ten long years, ten long years
With a wig on his head and a gavel in his hand
Give him ten long years, ten long years

Chorus :
They say 'Come!' and they say 'Go!'
One more night and then it's tomorrow
Serving time for another man's crime
for Ten long years

Other verses include the lines:

Protected by the arm of the Law / The sins of the rich are the trials of the poor

When Justice lies in the hands of a fool / it sews the seeds of doubt in us all.

My adaptation keeps fairly strictly to meter and rhyme scheme of the original, and echos the original in several ways -- "serving time for another man's crime" becomes "corner time for a naughty girl's crime" for example, and "When Justice lies in the hands of a fool" becomes "with justice done by the means of a tool". This is the sort of thing that I strive for when I do a song adaptation, and I can recommend this one to those who have enjoyed my other adaptations

The library and various other people call this sort of thing a "song parody". Back when I posted this sort of thing on the SSS newsgroup, that also was the term used by most posters for such a thing. To me, this is not quite the right term. A parody, strictly speaking, twists the original in order to comment on or mock the original. For example, Mark Twin wrote a parody of The US "Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the time of the US war in the Philippines. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic,_Updated) He wanted to point out that the high ideals of the Union advocates at the time of the US civil war, expressed in the original, (which compared the Union cause to the divine justice of God, with the chorus "Lo, God is Marching on") had been replaced by cynical and calculating motives and selfishness. Thus the original line "He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat" became in Twain's parody "We hath banded with the strumpet and are guarding her retreat" (pointing pout that the army was semi-officially protecting prostitutes). Other lines from the parody include "Lo Greed is marching on" and "He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;" and the original's "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free," became "As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich".

This is true parody, where the form of the original is used to invert or mock or comment on its content. In contrast, my own "The Paddle Hymn of the Privileged Public" copies the form of the same original closely, but in a way that has nothing at all to do with the original meaning. For example "He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat" becomes "He has sounded forth the summons that she never wants to meet" and "He" refers to a spanking Dom, not to God. In SF fandom, this sort of thing is known as a "filk" (supposedly derived from a typo in an announcement of "folk songs"). I advocated the use of that term back on SSS, but I could never get anyone else to adopt it. Still I do think the distinction is worth making.

Hmmm. I wonder what Weird Al Yankovic would say if we were to refer to his lyrics as burlesques or pastiches, assuming American audiences could understand the difference in terms?

Musicologists might disagree with your opinion. I think you may be leaning more on the literary definition of parody; the musical use of the term is much broader and can refer to any re-purposing of an existing tune. The Twain example you cite, with its biting irony and satire, is certainly a literary parody of the original lyrics. But it also qualifies as "parody music" by virtue of its reuse of the music in "Battle Hymn", which was itself a musical parody of "John Brown's Body" (and if you want to go back even further, "John Brown's Body" was a musical parody of the tune "Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us" which arose out of the American camp meeting tradition).

Yankovic's works and the musical offerings we see here in the Library, on the other hand, I would say are purely musical parodies: taking an existing tune and providing new lyrics, with comic effect (I have to confess I have not really looked at many of the lyrics presented in the Library, so some of them may very well qualify as literary parody when compared with the lyrics they supplant in their shared melody).

Yes, I do come at this from the literary tradition. But even in the musical tradition, the term "parody" did not use to be used for any repurposing of a tune. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries it was common to write a new song to an existing well-known tune, and this was not regarded as a parody. Indeed "The Star-Spangled Banner" re-used the tune of "To Anacreon in Heaven", a somewhat literary drinking song. Most ballads used tunes from earlier ballads. Most broadsides gave lyrics only, noting the name of the existing tune to which they were set, and these were not considered parodies.

I would add that not all of the musical repurposing we see here in the library is for 'comic effect". Some are as much for erotic effect, I would say. Or some for other effects.

For example, my own "'Bad Girl!' Doesn't Mean Forever " is not particularly comic, it is essentially a love song, with a point to make about a D/S relationship. My "The Dominator " also has something (a rather different something) to say about a D/S relationship. Other examples might be cited.

It is true that one of the appeals of such a work is the cleverness of the repurposing, the way in which the original is modified for a very different effect while staying recognizably close to the original. In some cases this is perhaps the primary appeal, such as my "A Paddling Tonight". This appeal is not unlike that of a pun, and might be called "comic".

In any case, whatever term is used, I think that the distinction between a derivative work that responds to or mocks the content of the original, and one that merely reuses its form for a completely different purpose, is worth making. If both are to be called parodies, then they are parodies of rather different types.

Fully agree. I think that in order to make the distinction clearer, it's perhaps better (as Preacherswife suggests) to refer to the latter type of parody as a 'pastiche', which is doing exactly that - not mocking or sending up the original, but re-using it for a different purpose. That's what I've always tried to do in my own attempts, whether taking my models from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, or from Gershwin and Cole Porter.

Interestingly, the word 'parody' didn't always carry connotations of mockery. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance many composers (such as Josquin and de la Rue) composed what were known as 'parody masses', using pre-existing tunes as the basis of their works. These were pious ecclesiastical choral pieces, in no way intended as send-ups.

I have always used "pastiche" to mean a sincere imitation of an original. Particularly when another author attempts to continue a work created by the original author. For example, the many Sherlock Holmes stories that try to recreate the original characters, setting and style as precisely as they can are pastiches, including the set by Adrian Connan-Doyle (Sir Aurther's son). Or, in the realm of spanking fiction, the attempts to write more stories in Lurking Dragon's Rejuve setting that try to stay reasonably faithful to that setting.

But perhaps the term "pastiche" will suffice to indicate a re-purposing that imitates form but does not comment on the content of the original.

I've done a few song parodies - the first being Stacy's Bum (parody of Stacy's Mom), but I have others posted here.

The hardest part of doing a parody is keeping the meter. You need to keep the number of syllables more or less the same and try to keep the emphasize on the right syllables. It's harder than it seems.

It's one of the hard things, certainly - but equally tricky, I find, is sticking to the rhyme-scheme, especially if you're pastiching a cunning, ingenious writer like Cole Porter. Porter had a wicked knack for internal rhymes; making sure I'd covered all of them in my reworking of 'You're the Top' (as 'I'm a Top') took quite some doing.

Parodies and adaptations of previously existing songs and tunes have a long and rich history in music. Many of Bob Dylan's early songs borrowed melodies from old English and Scottish ballads. For instance the melody of his powerful song A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall is that of the very old ballad Lord Randall My Son, and his verse structure is derived from it too.
Woody Guthrie was another, using old songs,writing new lyrics to them to address contemporary issues. His No Home In This World Anymore was an old hymn that referred to life after death. He wrote new lyrics addressing the hardships of the Great Depression.
People even do it with their own songs. The late Phil Ochs wrote the song Here's To The State of Mississippi after the murder of civil rights workers in 1964. Later he re-wrote it as Here's To The State of Richard Nixon when his impeachment was being called for.