I don’t fish. I don’t even eat fish. But I was intrigued by this list of songs about fishing, published in 2008 on the Oklahoman newspaper’s blog site NewsOK.
I was lured to add a few of my own, without that whole “angling” angle.
1. The Codfish Ball, Shirley Temple and Ray Bolger. I play this one on the ukulele, and while I’m neither as cute as Ms. Temple or as tap-happy as Mr. Bolger, the song always a highlight when I play live because of the atrocious wordplay: “Catfish is a dancin’ man, but he can’t can-can like a [pause] sardine can.” It’s sort of a Teddy Bear’s Picnic of fish: “There’ll be no hook in sight at the Codfish Ball.”
2. Modest Mouse, The Whale Song. Doesn’t really mention whales, just scouts. But it’s The Whale Song.
3. Tom Waits, Fish in the Jailhouse. From the collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, in 2006. Waits also (with his wife Kathleen Brennan) composed “Fish and Bird”: “A song that we’d never heard, a song of a little bird/That fell in love with a whale.”
4. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine.” An early showstopper in Showboat which also nails the (at that point) unrevealed multi-cultural background of the character who sings it, Julie. “Fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly.”
5. Harry Nilsson, “Think About Your Troubles.” From The Point. There’s a wonderful cover of this, appropriately enough, by the band Jellyfish.
You can take your teardrops
And drop them in a teacup
Take them down to the riverside
And throw them over the side
To be swept up by a current
And taken to the ocean
To be eaten by some fishes
Who were eaten by some fishes
And swallowed by a whale
Who grew so old
He decomposed.
6. Barnes and Barnes, “Fishheads.” Eat ‘em up, yum. Iconic early indie experimental novelty hit from 1978. One of the Barneses was Billy Mumy of Lost in Space “Will Robinson! Will Robinson!” fame. The other is Robert Haimer.
7. The Punk Group, “Fish Sticks for Jesus.” New Wavey keyboard-driven 98-second song with low growling vocals followed by a chirpy guy going “Fish Sticks for Jesus! Fish Sticks for Jesus!”
8. Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five, “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” British TV star Stephen Fry adapted the title for his late-‘80s series Saturday Night Fry.
9. Townes Van Zandt, “The Catfish Song.” It begins:
Down at the bottom of that dirty ol’ river
Down where the reeds and the catfish play
There lies a dream as soft as the water
There lies a bluebird that’s flown away.
Seems you can’t write a song about fish without mentioning birds.
10. Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, “Lazybones”:
And when you go fishin’
I bet you keep wishin’
The fish won’t grab at your line.
Another Carmichael song, “Small Fry,” was turned into a classic 1939 Fleischer Brothers cartoon, in which the mischievous protagonist is a young fish.