Tom Lehrer, mathematician, songwriter and satirist, dies at 97

Tom Lehrer in the 1943 edition of the Loomiscellany yearbook produced by the Loomis School. (Photo: Wikimedia)[Missing Credit]

But Lehrer continued writing parody songs and, in 1953, he recorded his first album on his own dime. It became a cult hit thanks to word-of-mouth publicity and distribution at local concerts, thrusting him into a musical career that would include multiple world tours, TV and radio appearances, and a spot in the Billboard Top 20 list for his 1965 album That Was The Year That Was.

As revered for his lyrical skills as for his deftness on the piano, Lehrer could play anything: from ragtime to jazz, folk ballads to Christmas songs, calypso to Mozart. But Lehrer all the while taught mathematics at MIT, Harvard and the University of California, ultimately choosing his career in academia over the limelight in the 1970s after his last live performance in 1967.

Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen, 1967. (Photo: Wikimedia)[Missing Credit]

He told the New York Times in 2000: “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection. If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”

Lehrer also attributed his retirement from parody writing to certain political events, and was often quoted as saying that political satire became “obsolete” when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.

But the satirist’s legacy never disappeared from music – performers like “Weird Al” Yankovic are living proof – and Lehrer himself made brief forays back into songwriting. In 1990 he wrote one of the only songs to allude to his Jewish heritage, I’m Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica, for Garrison Keillor’s Saturday radio show, The American Radio Company.

The song was commissioned by Garrison Keiller for his radio programme in an attempt to remedy the fact that Jews had penned countless Christmas songs but seemingly none for their own holidays.

Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen, 1967. (Photo: Wikimedia)[Missing Credit]

“I’m spending Hanukkah/ In Santa Monica,/ Wearing sandals,/ Lighting candles By the sea,” the song goes. “Amid the California flora/ I’ll be lighting my menorah,/ Like a baby in the cradle,/ I’ll be playing with my dreidel,/ Here’s to Judas Maccabeus,/ Boy, if he could only see us,/ Spending Hanukkah/ In Santa Monica/ By the sea.”

In 2000, Rhino Records released The Remains of Tom Lehrer, a complete set of his entire oeuvre which included a booklet about his life. The introduction, written by Barry Hansen (aka Dr. Demento), states that Lehrer’s parents were “ethnically, but not religiously, Jewish”, a point which is then expounded upon by Lehrer himself as he explains his Jewishness was “more to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue. My brother and I went to Sunday School, but we had Christmas trees, and ‘God’ was primarily an expletive, usually preceded by ‘oh’ or ‘my’ or both.”

In October 2020 Lehrer released his entire body of work into the public domain, relinquishing the copyright on all his music and lyrics.

Lehrer, who never married or had children, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts last weekend at the age of 97.