Tom Lehrer began writing comic songs as an undergraduate student at Harvard University, including Fight Fiercely, Harvard (1945).

Many of his early songs were parodies of popular songs, especially from musical theatre. For example, he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's Major-General's Song in his show, The Physical Revue, a pun on a leading scientific journal, The Physical Review).

He paid for his first album, Songs By Tom Lehrer, to be recorded in a studio, and sold copies by mail order. Without any promotion, it became a big hit by word of mouth.

Encouraged by his success he did a series of concert tours and released a second album, which came in two versions: a studio album, More Songs by Tom Lehrer and An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer with the same songs recorded live in concert.

He was an even bigger hit in the UK where the BBC was willing to play his songs on the radio, thus giving him more exposure than he got in the USA, where most radio stations were not ready for his biting satire.

Many of his songs contain black humour of the type that used to be known as "sick comedy." This can be seen in songs like Masochism Tango, I Hold Your Hand in Mine, Oedipus Rex and Poisoning the Pigeons in the Park.

In the early 1960s, Lehrer worked as the resident songwriter for the U.S. edition of That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a satirical TV show. More and more of his songs became overtly political, with comments on subjects such as Pollution, Vatican II (The Vatican Rag), racism (National Brotherhood Week and I Wanna Go Back to Dixie ), education (New Math), plagiarism (Lobachevsky), American militarism ( Send the Marines), war (So Long, Mom), and nuclear proliferation (Who's Next?, MLF Lullaby and We'll All Go Together When We Go). He also wrote a song questioning the morality of Wernher von Braun.

The Irish Ballad

This is an ancient Irish ballad, which was written by the great musical satirist, Tom Lehrer. It has a modal tune, which, Lehrer explained in his introduction, means that he plays a wrong note every now and then.

He had to admit that it is not really like a genuine folk ballad because the words which are supposed to rhyme actually do.

Here is a nice animated cartoon illustrating the song sung by Tom Lehrer himself.

Here is my video of the song and here are the words.

When You Are Old and Gray

Tom Lehrer's song about love and old age, a worthy companion piece to songs like Silver Threads Among the Gold. Here is a video of the master himself singing the song.

Here are the lyrics and here is my performance.