Jerry Samuels, creator of a novelty hit, dead at 84

Jerry Samuels, who under the name Napoleon XIV recorded one of the 1960s’ strangest and most successful novelty songs, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-haaa!,” died on March 10 in Phoenixville, Pa. He was 84.

His son said the cause was complications of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Samuels hadmodest success as a songwriter and was working as an engineer at Associated Recording Studios in New York when, in 1966, he and a fellow engineer, Nat Schnapf, set a bit of doggerel that Samuels had written to — well, “music” may not be quite the right word, because the song consists of Samuels rhythmically talking over a backing of tambourine, snare and bass drums, and clapping.

The narrator laments that he has been left by a loved one and has been driven insane as a result:

“They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaa

“They’re coming to take me away

“Ho-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha, to the funny farm

“Where life is beautiful all the time

“And I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats

“And they’re coming to take me away, ha-ha.”

Only in the last verse does the listener learn that it wasn’t a woman who left the now crazed gent, but a dog.

Through recording studio manipulation that was innovative for the time, Samuels’ voice morphed into high-pitched lunacy as the choruseswent along.

In a memoir, Samuels wrote that he wanted to use a stage name for the record and a drummer friend suggestednapoleon. Someone else suggested adding some kind of appendage.

“I picked XIV strictly because I liked how it looked next tonapoleon,” Samuels wrote. “Rumors were rampant about hidden meanings, but there were none, at least not consciously.”

The record was released by Warner Bros. in July 1966 (the flip side was the song played backward), but no stationwould play it unTILWABC in New York, one of the nation’s leading Top 40 stations, broadcast an excerpt as a gag, Samuels wrote.

It peaked atno. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100.