Tom Lehrer, the influential musical satirist and educator, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His friend David Herder confirmed the news. Lehrer was 97.
Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born on April 9, 1928, to a secular Jewish family who lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Lehrer began studying classical piano at 7 years old, but he realized early on he was more interested in contemporary popular music. He shifted his focus to writing pop songs and show tunes, becoming a child prodigy, and by 15 he was studying at Harvard. While at Harvard, he began writing comic songs for his own enjoyment and to entertain his friends. But he studied mathematics instead of music, graduating magna cum laude. He self-released his debut album Songs By Tom Lehrer in 1953.
Lehrer began teaching mathematics at a number of universities, including Harvard, until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955. He spent two years as a member of the National Security Agency, but he didn't publicly reveal this information until 2020, because the agency's existence was classified at the time. His experience on the army base inspired songs of his including"The Wild West is Where I Want to Be" and "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier." (He also once claimed to have invented the Jello shot as a way to get around the base's alcohol ban.)
Lehrer returned to Cambridge and resumed a career as a full-time educator. He taught at Harvard and MIT before joining the faculty at the University Of California, Santa Cruz, combining his two passions by teaching an introductory math course for liberal arts majors. He'd occasionally perform his songs in the class, a course he'd nicknamed "Math For Tenors."
Though Lehrer only released two studio albums and rarely toured, he accrued a cult following. His music was used frequently in the Doctor Demento Show, and the British theater producer Cameron Mackintosh produced a jukebox musical called Tomfoolery based on his songs; Lehrer didn't have much involvement in the production, but praised it. Randy Newman, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, and "Weird Al" Yankovic are just a few of the songwriters who'd go on to cite Lehrer as a major incluence on their work.
In 2020, Lehrer relinquished all his songs to the public domain. Revisit some of them below.
