And we also did a parody on, at the same date [of "Lost In A Whirlpool"], we did a parody of The Search For Bridey Murphy. [...] The story about the girl who gets hypnotised and taken back, and she supposedly remembers a life before the life that she's living now, and documents it all. Yeah, and goes through all these scenes, and so we did a parody on that where this guy is being hypnotised, and his voice—while he's being hypnotised the voice is played by one of the school teachers named Jerry Ullberg, who has a very nice white suburban sort of voice. And as he goes farther and farther back, he becomes Tom Dooley. And it turns out that Tom Dooley is a very uh, a sort of jivey negroid shoeshine boy or something, I don't know what kind of rendition Vliet is giving to it, but it's a funny concept, and it tells about how Tom Dooley gets hung because he was fucking some pie.
In 1956, Morey Bernstein wrote a (non-fiction) book about a woman named Ruth Simmons, who, under hypnosis, spoke in the voice of Bridey Murphy, a nineteenth-century woman from Cork, Ireland. A movie was made about it the same year. And Stan Freberg recorded "The Quest For Bridey Hammerschlaugen" (released as the b-side of The Great Pretender [April 1956]).
"Tom Dooley" is an old North Carolina folk song based on the 1866 murder of a woman named Laura Foster in Wilkes County, North Carolina. It is best known today because of a hit version recorded in 1958 by The Kingston Trio. This version was a multi-format hit, reaching #1 in Billboard, the Billboard R&B listing, and appearing in the Cashbox country music top 20.
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