“Come on-a My House” by Rosemary Clooney

song info

    “Come on-a My House” by Rosemary Clooney is a classic pop song.

link to the static song information page for this song:
http://www.thissideofsanity.com/music/songs/co/comeonamyhouse.php

    Summary quotation from Wikipedia:

    “Come on-a My House” is a song performed by Rosemary Clooney on her album Come On-A My House, released on June 6, 1951. The song was written by Ross Bagdasarian and his cousin, the Armenian American Pulitzer Prize winning author William Saroyan, in the summer of 1939, while driving across New Mexico. The melody is based on an Armenian folk song.

    It was not performed until the 1950, off-Broadway production of The Son. The song did not become a hit until the release of Clooney’s recording.

    It was probably Saroyan’s only effort at popular songwriting, and it was one of Bagdasarian’s few well-known works that was not connected to his best-known creation, Alvin and the Chipmunks. Bagdasarian, as David Seville, went on to much fame with his Chipmunks recordings.

Rosemary Clooney

    The song was first performed during 1950 in an off-Broadway production of The Son, but did not become a hit until the release of Clooney’s recording.

    The song was a major hit for Clooney in 1951; it was the first of a number of dialect songs she did. She recorded the song with Mitch Miller and his orchestra and harpsichordist Stan Freeman in the early part of 1951, and the song reached #1 on the Billboard charts, staying in the top position for eight weeks.

    Clooney sang the song in the 1953 film The Stars Are Singing in a scene where she ended up mocking the song and said no one would listen to it.

    Although she performed “Come on-a My House” for many years, Clooney later confessed that she hated the song. She said she had been given a practice record of the song and told Miller that the song wasn’t for her. Miller gave her an ultimatum: record the song or be fired. During a 1988 interview, Clooney said that whenever she listened to the recording she could hear the anger in her voice for being forced to sing it. Little did she know that the song would become one of her biggest hits.

Background

    The song was written by Ross Bagdasarian and his cousin, the Armenian American Pulitzer-Prize-winning author William Saroyan, in the summer of 1939, while driving across New Mexico. With a melody based on an Armenian folk song, the song touches upon traditional Armenian customs of inviting over relatives and friends and providing them with a generously overflowing table of fruits, nuts, seeds, and other foods.

—from Wikipedia (the Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License applies to Wikipedia’s block of text and possible accompanying picture, along with any alterations, transformations, and/or building upon Wikipedia’s original text that ThisSideofSanity.com applied to this block of text)

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