Lehrer was a regular act at San Francisco's Purple Onion and Hungry i in the mid 50s, along with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce and Phyllis Diller and more. At some point in the mid-1950s, MIT mathematician and general satirical gadabout Tom Lehrer heard the song and began including it in his shows, always careful to credit Harnick from the stage - to little avail because to this day many people assume it to be a Lehrer composition. Harnick's "Merry Minuet" was composed for an off-Broadway review, one that also included songs by Michael Brown, whose "Lizzie Borden" and "The John Birch Society" later got the Chad Mitchell Trio off and running in terms of radio airplay. Harnick is a pro's pro, and if his lyrics never quite attain the poetic flavor of Oscar Hammerstein or Alan Jay Lerner, they possess truer emotional depths and a much more wicked and satiric trenchancy - think "Do You Love Me?" for the former and "If I Were A Rich Man" for the latter.
But he also wrote the words for the songs in Fiorello! and She Loves Me and the musical play version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - and maybe fifteen other profitable shows on The Great White Way. Harnick would be enshrined in the pantheon of great American lyricists had he never written anything other than his best-known work, Fiddler on The Roof (with music by Harnick's long-time collaborator, Jerry Bock), which is surely one of the best and most enduring classics of Broadway musical theater. Well, for one, it's a well-crafted composition by an expert crafter of lyrics. So why has "The Merry Minuet" beaten the odds and remained funny through all these years? Few comic impressionists were as gifted as was David Frye, and if you look today at videos of his Nixon, LBJ, RFK, William Buckley and more, you'll still probably laugh at how apt his barbs were - but your children will wonder what's so amusing about the guy. Vaughn Meader's The First Family was a brilliant and affectionate send-up in 1962 that wouldn't even get a smile (much less a laugh) out of anyone under the age of 60 today. Usually nothing has so short a shelf life as topical humor. "This Land" and "Blowin' In The Wind" have a distinct advantage in that regard over "Minuet" because their themes are universal and even more because they are not humorous. "Blowin' In The Wind" is surely an offspring of the Civil Rights era, and it was the Dust Bowl and Great Depression that engendered "This Land Is Your Land" - but does anyone doubt that those tunes will be loved and sung a century from now? What was originally created to be timely can occasionally become timeless, as with those two classics.īut I doubt that Harnick could have foreseen that his composition would remain as apropos as it has.
But the best topical songs seem to acquire lives of their own, or "legs" as they used to say on Broadway. The vast majority of such songs amuse or rankle (or both) for a few years and then get dumped into the folk "remainder" bin when they lose their relevance as the events and conditions that inspire them fade into newer sorrows, outrages, and idiocies.
It is both amusing and disconcerting to find that a song like Sheldon Harnick's "Merry Little Minuet" that was written in 1948 or '49 as a topical comment on those times retains both its humor and its relevance more than six decades later. Believe it or not, that was written in the 50s I think, maybe late 40s.
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