Released 1963 Genre Zydeco | Format 7" (45 rpm) Length 2:00 | |
B-side "I Really Don't Want to Know" | ||
"Yakety Sax" is a pop-jazz instrumental jointly composed by James Q. "Spider" Rich and Boots Randolph. Boots Randolph, a saxophonist, popularized the selection in his 1963 recording. UK comedian Benny Hill later made it more widely known as the theme music of The Benny Hill Show.
Contents
The selection includes pieces of assorted fiddle tunes and was originally composed by Rich for a performance at a venue called The Armory in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Two bars of "Entrance of the Gladiators" and "The Girl I Left Behind" are also worked into it.
Randolph's take on the piece was inspired by a sax solo in the Leiber and Stoller song "Yakety Yak," recorded in 1958 by The Coasters. The tunes are similar, and both feature the "yakety sax" sound. Randolph first recorded "Yakety Sax" that year for RCA Victor, but it did not become a hit till he re-recorded it for Monument Records in 1963; this version reached #35 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Other performances
Personnel
Television, film, radio, and internet
"Yakety Sax" is often used in television and film as a soundtrack for outlandishly humorous situations. It was frequently used to accompany comedic sketches in the Thames Television comedy program The Benny Hill Show, where it accompanied otherwise silent, rapidly paced comedy sequences that typically involved a farcical chase scene. Indeed, thanks to Hill, "Yakety Sax" is so closely linked to the show that it is also known as "The Benny Hill Theme." On The Benny Hill Show, the music was performed by Ronnie Aldrich and His Orchestra.
This use of the piece, and the chase scenes themselves, have been parodied in many other movies and TV shows, including Get a Life, the 2006 American film V for Vendetta, in the 2015 Doctor Who episode "The Girl Who Died", and the animated TV shows The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park. The stop motion animated sketch comedy series Robot Chicken featured a brief sketch depicting Benny Hill's funeral (using dolls) where the attendees have a Benny Hill Show type chase scene with many of the usual gags and a song similar to Yakety Sax. The theme was used during the 2012 Olympics beach volleyball event between sets (where rakers must rush to smooth out the court).
In 1962, The Lorenzo Show, a children's show aired locally in Baltimore on WJZ-13, used Yakety Sax as its theme song, but renamed it the "Lorenzo Stomp".
For many years in the 1960s, the afternoon children's show "Monty's Rascals" on WFBC, later WYFF-4, in Greenville, South Carolina, used the track to accompany humorous footage of old movies such as the Keystone Cops.