There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #2 – "Laughing Over My Grave" by Ray Stevens (1958)

Boy, you think that you know a guy...

For a long time, I thought that I knew Ray Stevens. Just before I turned ten years of age, I delighted in a ridiculous song that played on the radio constantly called The Streak. Stevens' strange novelty tune was the #1 song in the nation, and streaking – that is, running buck ass nekkid through an area in which one normally didn't run buck ass nekkid – was the big craze of 1974.

Streaking was everywhere in those days. My little brothers streaked around the house, giggling like little maniacs. (Sadly and scarily, there is photographic evidence of my own turn at childhood streaking through our household as well, but it was from several years earlier. Once more, I beat a trend.) Tuning into the news on a regular gathered one the latest on streaking at public venues. Time and again, crazy people showed up at sporting events to run across the field of play completely naked. The "art" of streaking even made it to the Oscars that year (one of the earliest ceremonies I remember watching). The appearance of a nude weirdo zipping across the stage afforded host David Niven which a prime opportunity at droll commentary: "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings."

Most ironically, the image of the streaker was especially alive on the radio. Singer Ray Stevens – who was by then very well known not just for a series of novelty record hits since the early 1960s (Ahab the Arab, Harry the Hairy Ape, Gitarzan) but for his serious, spiritual, Grammy-winning song, Everything Is Beautiful, which proved to be his first #1 Billboard hit. Stevens attacked the charts in '74 with a truly goofy song featuring the odd combination of "Action News" reports, spot interviews (the same guy over and over), fake audience laughter, and a nonsense phrase ("Boogity-boogity") into an international sensation. (The song topped the UK charts as well.)

I recall some brief discussion in our house between my parents over whether it was appropriate for me to be so obsessed with the song at my tender age, but like all such arguments regarding free speech in our family, I won out eventually. I would have sung along with The Streak whether it was on the radio or not, so why not just have a good laugh? Within the next couple of years, my brothers and I obtained a copy of a K-Tel collection called Looney Tunes, and featured amongst its 24 tracks was Ray Stevens singing The Streak. I still loved the song, but I suddenly had 23 other goofy titles to completely memorize and so it tended to get played a little less than the others. My Old Man's a Dustman, Dinner with Drac, Haunted House, Little 'Eefin Annie, Alley Oop, Transfusion, They're Coming to Take Me Away, Hello Muddah Hello Fadduh, My Boomerang Won't Come Back... too many great tunes for me to concentrate on a single one, especially one that I had already sung a thousand times.

And yet, there was one song on the collection that got a special amount of attention regardless. It was The Hustlers singing their rendition of the singalong classic Shaving Cream, in which the threatened implication of the word "shit" at the end of every verse would be replaced with a long "Shhhhhh..." sound and then "...aving cream/Be nice and clean/Shave everyday and you'll always look keen." (The song has had something of a revival this year as the regular intermission act on the new version of The Gong Show.) If you thought there was discussion before between my parents regarding an entirely clean song about people running around nekkid, just think about what this one did. And yet, once again, free speech took the day.

Cut to a couple of years later, my parents were divorced, and my father had his own place... well, a house that he split with an old buddy from work. He had his own record collection as well, and one of the first albums I remember was a compilation from 1977 called The Many Sides of Ray Stevens. When my brothers and I discovered this double album, it pretty much became the most played LP in my dad's house when we were over every other weekend. Well, the second record in the set, that is. We had little use for Sides A and B. The reason for the Many Sides in the title was to imply that Ray had a serious side as well as a more goony side. Really, the set should have been called "The Two Sides of... But Ray Would Like You to Forgot the Second One and Concentrate on the First One" Those first two sides were composed of recognizable Stevens hits like Everything Is Beautiful, his relatively recent (then) countrified smash version of the standard Misty, Turn Your Radio On, America Communicate with Me, and then a bunch of other nicely sung but fairly bland songs.

But on the second record in the compilation, nine of the ten songs were pure Ray Stevens goofy gold, and just made for me and my brothers. This is where I really got to dig into his classic novelty tunes. In addition to the four mentioned already in this piece, I got my first taste of Bridget the Midget (The Queen of the Blues), Freddie Feelgood (and His Funky Little Four-Piece Band), the fabulously (and then record-breakingly) titled Jeremiah Peabody's Poly-Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills, and my surprising favorite of the group, The Moonlight Special. I was then getting regular late-night viewings of Wolfman Jack on The Midnight Special, and so finding a song that sent up the show with a character named "The Sheepdog" – who howled along in his intros to the musicians – really got me laughing hard. Stevens also had his own version of The Coasters' Along Came Jones, which was OK, but nowhere near the original (which I got to know intimately on that same Looney Tunes compilation from earlier). Stevens had a whole lot more silly songs that could have closed out Many Sides (I wish Santa Claus Is Watching You was included) but they chose to go with another serious song called Nashville, which is a very pleasant song even today, but which kind of ruined the comedy rush for me as a kid.

After that point, apart from his great chicken-clucking In the Mood single, Stevens kind of disappeared for me. I got into rock 'n' roll as a teenager and didn't look back. I still saw him hit the charts from time to time, especially when MTV started. I would get occasional glimpses of a Stevens video for his latest single on one video show or another, since every network and channel seemed to have started up their own pocket versions of MTV at the time. Goofy tunes like It's Me Again, Margaret or The Mississippi Squirrel Revival would get caught in my sights from time to time, especially if they ended up hitting The Dr. Demento Show (which I listened to avidly for years and years), but I never had any real impulse to follow through with getting one of Ray's newer albums.

This is a good thing, because the one aspect that I surmised from his continued single releases was that he was more intent on building his country music following than he was continued fame on the pop charts. His humor seemed to be growing ever more cornpone, sometimes to sub-Hee Haw levels, and that pursuit just didn't interest me. Eventually, I heard Ray remake a couple of his earlier hits, but his voice was deeper and the updated comedy came off as too stilted. Adapting the old material with new jokes just didn't wear well on my ears. I did appreciate that he continued to release new novelty records on a regular basis, mixing them with his "straight" stuff, but I just wasn't his crowd anymore. For funny songs, I had "Weird" Al, who had (and still has) a much higher ratio of quality to fluff.

We are going to leap a whole lot of time to the past couple of years, where on a whim, I decided to check out what ol' Ray had been up to lately. Sadly, his comedy has grown almost completely reactionary, as befits his political leanings. Intent on making clumsy party points in his dotage, he now has songs that will seek to make statements by prefacing them with lines like "...But if Obama gets his way..." And I get enough of that shit from certain members of my family. I don't need it on my iTunes, especially when the songs are simply knee-jerk responses to things propped up by Fox News and the alt-right that were only meant to rile up their homegrown audience in the first place.

As to whether he actually voted for Volde-Moron or not, I have not seen definitive proof, but many of the songs Stevens has been releasing of late seem to prop up various horrid talking points echoed by the Angry Orange. And so it seems that Ray and I would probably be unlikely to ever be friends if we ever met. It's sad, because I still do love many of Mr. Steven's older songs – and will continue to play and sing along with them (even Ahab the Arab, which pretty much introduced the notion of white Americans saying "Ay-rab" instead of "Err-ub"), much in the way that I will never get Bill Cosby's standup albums out of my system. Plugged in since youth and I cannot divorce myself from them. Besides, there are probably even some gems hidden in Ray's discography that I would find interesting if only I took the time to search for them.

So, what about the mixtape?

Now, one might think that my reference at the beginning of this piece to "you think you know a guy" might refer to Mr. Stevens' current far right leanings. You would be very wrong. After all, I suspected from the glimpses I had of Stevens in recent years, especially already knowing his main audience, that he was exactly the sort who would fall for the snake-oil jive of the current administration. He bent over and they have had him time and again. And I am not surprised by it at all. That's where a good portion of his older audience is now as well. Who wants to stop a good rogering once it has started?

What I was really referring to was the genuine joy and surprise I had in finding one of those hidden gems in his discography that I mentioned, in particular, a certain genre of song that I was very surprised to find he had recorded in his early years. The song I am adding to my mixtape today – Laughing Over My Grave – pretty much keelhauled me when I first heard it. Dating to 1964 (as far as I can tell), when it was released as the B-side to one of his "normal" novelty singles, Bubble Gum the Bubble Dancer (which didn't chart), Laughing Over My Grave is a revelation on more than one front, especially if you have even passing familiarity with Ray Stevens' catalogue.

First, it is a surprisingly soulful, bluesy number with a large dose of eerieness, which allows Ray to purely "sing" more than he often does on his earlier stuff before he broke through on the pop charts with his completely straight-laced composition, Everything Is Beautiful. His voice, however, still has that rock 'n' roll growl to it as he snaps out the lyrics. Second, while the song is paired with an outright novelty number, and is also within that subgenre as well, Laughing Over My Grave is not outwardly funny. There is not a true, intentional joke within the lyrics or the final production, even with Laughing in the title and the additional of maniacal jags of shrieking madness throughout the song. Laughing Over My Grave is a straight up murder ballad, told from the point of view of the victim of a love affair gone truly, truly insane.

Such a simple murder at the end of a gun may also not seem like normal Halloween fare, but the fact that it is a murder ballad and the macabre twist of the story being told while the singer lies "dying in a pool of blood" certainly lends a spookier mood to the song than it normally warrant. Especially surprising is that it comes from the generally happy go lucky, nonsense heavy Ray Stevens just after he has already attained some small measure of fame.

The song starts out as seeming like just another silly tune. To the beat of a slowed down mambo groove, an eerie mood is set instantly by the inclusion of what seems either like a recorder or a slide whistle making a ghostly intrusion. But that same eerie mood, probably due to the instrumentation, and given the fact of who sings the words, makes the listener expect the song is going to have a goofy twist near the end, that will make everything sunnier. And you couldn't be more wrong...

Laughing Over My Grave
(Ray Stevens)

"When she looked at me just now,
I had a horrible feeling.
It made me shiver at the thoughts
Of what I might have driven her to.
I know I've cheated and lied,
I know I just used her,
And now I'm suddenly afraid
of what she might be planning to do.

[Chorus] I can hear her laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!
Laughing...
Laughing over my grave
Over my grave

Now, get that wild, wicked look
Right out of your eye
'Cause baby don't you know 
That I'm too cool to die?
I'm sorry for the wrong i've done.
C'mon, honey,
L-let's just put down that gun!
I'm begging you, please...
At least give me a chance to run!

Well, I felt the floor come up and
Hit me with an empty thud,
And here I lie 
Dying in a pool of blood
I know I've tortured her 
And treated her wrong
And laughed at her misery 
For so long,
But I guess she's the one
Who'll be laughing from now on.

[Chorus]
I can hear her laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!
Burning all the money I saved
And laughing over my grave.

I can hear her 
Laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!

Burning all the cash I saved... 
[FADE OUT]

And there you have it... Ray, I didn't know you had that in you. Sure, it was recorded a hell of a long time ago, but I just heard it in the last couple of years. What makes the listener understand how insane the murderer has been driven by the narrator is that she apparently spends part of her time "burning all the money" and "cash" that he has saved. Well, I guess that would be insane from his angle... she must be a maniac for doing so, and this really points out how Ray's conservative leanings were there in his music all along (as if I had a doubt anyway).

Which makes me wonder how an updated version of this song would go were Ray to remake it today. He would be singing the same lyrics for the most part and then get to the line where she starts to burn his money. And then he would kick in with this instead...

"...But if Obama has his way...!"

RTJ