Ringo meets Irving at High Noon

I discovered the Dr. Demento show when I was in Junior High School in the 1970’s, and one of the novelty songs that was soon indelibly written on my brain was Frank Gallop‘s “The Ballad of Irving”, a little tragicomic ditty about a Jewish cowboy who happens to be the 142nd fastest gun in the west. (Even on the range, we are assured, Irving used two sets of dishes.) It’s a fun tune:

If you look on the album cover in the video, you’ll also see Valerie Harper’s name.

Fast forward a little over three decades. I start listening to Pandora; and because my tastes are broader than they were in the ’70’s, a bit of country music begins to creep into my “Eclectic” Pandora station. Seems that Lorne Green took time off from the Ponderosa to record a song about gunman Johnny Ringo:

And after I’d heard it a few times, the penny dropped, and I did a little research. “Ringo” was a #1 hit. And “The Ballad of Irving” was recorded the following year. Yes, indeed; all this time I’d been enjoying the spoof and had never realized that it was a spoof. It’s kind of like being a Weird Al Yankovic fan and having no concept of Michael Jackson.