Tom Lehrer, the popular and erudite song satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism, and the Cold War, then largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other universities, has died. He was 97. Longtime friend David Herder said Lehrer died Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the AP reports. He did not specify a cause of death. Accompanying himself on piano, Lehrer built a following by setting his wide-ranging, sometimes salacious mockery—on subjects as grim as nuclear annihilation—to tunes that the New York Times says "tended to be maddeningly cheerful."
A prodigy at Harvard, where he earned a math degree at age 18, Lehrer soon turned his sharp mind to old traditions and current events, per the AP. His songs included "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," "The Old Dope Peddler," "Be Prepared" (in which he mocked the Boy Scouts), and "The Vatican Rag." In that last one, the atheist poked fun at the Roman Catholic Church with lyrics such as: "Get down on your knees, fiddle with your rosaries. Bow your head with great respect, and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect." He did it in a musical style reminiscent of his heroes Gilbert and Sullivan and Stephen Sondheim, the latter a lifelong friend. He was cited by Randy Newman and "Weird Al" Yankovic as an influence.
He attacked discrimination and forms of music he didn't like, including modern folk songs, rock 'n' roll and modern jazz. But he did it in such an erudite, even polite, manner that few objected. "Tom Lehrer is the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded," said musicologist Barry Hansen, who co-produced the 2000 boxed set of Lehrer's songs. He played Lehrer's music for decades on his "Dr. Demento" radio show. Lehrer's body of work was small, about three dozen songs. "When I got a funny idea for a song, I wrote it. And if I didn't, I didn't," he told the AP in 2000 during a rare interview. "I wasn't like a real writer who would sit down and put a piece of paper in the typewriter. And when I quit writing, I just quit. ... It wasn't like I had writer's block."
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Lehrer began to compose songs in the early 1950s to amuse friends, then started performing them at coffeehouses around Cambridge while teaching at Harvard and working on a master's. He cut his first record in 1953, Songs by Tom Lehrer, which included "I Wanna Go Back to Dixie," lampooning the Old South. After two years in the Army, Lehrer started to performing around the world. In 1959, he released More of Tom Lehrer and the live An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, nominated for a Grammy in 1960. Soon, he largely quit performing and returned to teaching. He started part time at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the 1970s, mainly to escape the New England winters. At times, he acknowledged, a student would enroll in his class because of his songs. "But it's a real math class," Lehrer said at the time. "I don't do any funny theorems."
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