Tom Lehrer - Vatican Rag

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{Chorus}
First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison
Doing the Vatican Rag

Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original
If it is, try playing it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate!

{Chorus}
So get down upon your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen
When in Rome do like a Roman
Ave Maria
Gee it's good to see ya
Getting ecstatic and
Sorta dramatic and
Doing the Vatican Rag!

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Tom Lehrer

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Biography

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Tom Lehrer (born 9 April 1928) is an American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician. He has lectured on mathematics and musical theater.

Before attending college, Lehrer graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. As an undergraduate student at Harvard University, he began to write comic songs to entertain his friends, including Fight Fiercely, Harvard (1945). Those songs later became ‘The Physical Revue’ in a joking reference to a leading scientific journal, The Physical Review. Influenced mainly by musical theater, his style consisted of parodying then-current forms of popular song. For example, his appreciation of list songs led him to set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song”.

Inspired by the success of his performances of his songs, he paid for some studio time to record an album, Songs By Tom Lehrer, which he sold by mail order. Self-published and unpromoted, the album, which included the macabre (I Hold Your Hand In Mine), the mildly risqué (Be Prepared), and the mathematical (Lobachevsky), became a success via word of mouth. With a cult hit, he embarked on a series of concert tours and released a second album, which came in two versions: the songs were the same but More Songs by Tom Lehrer was studio-recorded, while An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer was recorded live in concert.