Grammy-Nominated Song Satirist, Tom Lehrer, Dead at 97 He was Harvard University graduate in music and mathematics. He started with writin...

 Grammy-Nominated Song Satirist, Tom Lehrer, Dead at 97

He was Harvard University graduate in music and mathematics. He started with writing songs when he took classes at the Ivy League university in the 1950s.

He was a musical genius from the United States. His famous tracks include Tamil “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag” and “The Old Dope Peddler.” In fact, the last of the three was sampled by 2 Chainz once upon a time.

He released a live recording known as An Evening Wasted with Tom Leher in the year 1959. The album was nominated in the best comedy performance category in Grammys musical in 1960.

Many songwriters were inspired by his musical talents like Randy Newman, Donald Fagen, and Walter Becker. The humorous and comic Lamar “Weird Al” Yankovic posted about Tom Lehrer’s death on social media after he found out about his demise.

” My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Leher,” Al Yankovic shared on his Instagram caption.

In his lifetime, he wrote and released around thirty-six songs. He even wrote music for television shows like That Was the Week That Was and The Electric Company.

”When I had a good idea for song that was funny, I wrote it. And if I didn’t, I didn’t. I was never a real writer in the same way some people are where they sit down and get a piece of paper in the typewriter. And when I stopped writing, I stopped once and for all. It wasn’t like I had writer’s block,” Tom Leher said to the AP in a 2000 interview

He also shared the reason why a legend like him quit music in the same interview.

” I had a good time for a while,” he told the AP before adding that ” I enjoyed it up to a point.” Lehrer did eventually switch to teaching math full time, at Harvard and then at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Lehrer put his entire songbook into the public domain in 2020, meaning people can perform, use and reuse his music free of charge.

“In other words,” a disclaimer on his web site read 2020, “I have waived my copyright to the entire body of my work. So you can use any of this music for anything you want, in any way you want, and you don’t have to ask me, or even tell me about it. I realise that today’s media is not what it was in 1952, and I no longer make a living from CD sales or sheet music. I rely on performances and publishing.”