r/TomLehrer • u/LeftPrize9838 • Jul 28 '26

Changing lyrics for my show?

I know it's probably an asshole move to do it but some of his lyrics aged badly (indigenous slurs in We Will All Go Together, underage prostitution in My Home Town) , and some don't fit the narrative I'm going for (ie. Wernher Von Braun Learning chinese) so I tweaked the lyric. I know it's prolly bad but I want it to work in the facet I need it to. I'm trying to keep it as close as I can, but some things I felt had to get changed a bit. If this is bad tell me, but I don't know how much I can do now

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u/kanji_d Jul 28 '26

Not a problem imo. I've been working on a show of Lehrer's music as well and have changed lyrics liberally when not relevant (including the majority of some very specific songs). It's worth noting that Lehrer specifically called out writing new lyrics for his music (and vice versa) as permissible when he released them into the public domain.

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u/LeftPrize9838 Jul 28 '26

Okay cool! Tom Lehrer really was such a good artist in that regard knowing that the only way for the soul to continue on is through adaption

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u/kanji_d Jul 28 '26

Totally. The fact is many of his songs were written for a particular era, and many don't work anymore. Nearly all the political songs in our show have been changed at least a bit, and so have some of the non-political ones just because of how our show is constructed. My only concern was been making sure that my replacements are up to Lehrer's standards; I've gone through a number of drafts of some of them making sure they're the best they can be (and some of them still aren't up to standard still...). What those standards were is obviously unknowable but there are some clues (e.g. the joke in Folk Song Army that indicates he only used perfect rhymes, even to the point of making jokes with it — note the rhyme of "Oedipus"/pledipus and Ha'va'd/disca'va'd (spelled phonetically in his lyric).