I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat (Billy May, Alan Livingston, Warren Foster)
including Merrily We Roll Along (Charles Tobias, Murray Mencher, Eddie Cantor) 3.19 Mark Steyn, vocals
arranged and conducted by Kevin Amos
from the album Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin' Cats
When you do an album of cat songs, there are certain ones that everyone expects you to have - and "I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat", beloved by three generations of Looney Tunes fans, certainly falls into that category.
The only problem was that Mark couldn't think of any way to do it. Yes, Tweety and Sylvester are great, but hedidn't want to attempt a third-rate Mel Blanc impression, thufferin' thucotash. And yet there didn't seem to be any other way to sing the number. And then one day he chanced to be in the car tootling around and twiddling the radio dial and from out of nowhere came the Police song "Every Breath You Take". And, listening to the famous guitar intro, Mark suddenly thought: "Wait a minute! This is 'I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat'!"
And so he airily said to Kevin Amos, peerless musical director, let's do "I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat" in the style of "Every Breath You Take". And, instead of hurling the piano stool at him, Kevin came up with a cracking arrangement, including the Looney Tunes theme rendered on electric guitar by Pete Callard and spooky backing-vocal interjections by Emma, Jan and Alison. There's also a special appearance right at the end by David Porter-Thomas from the English National Opera.
So, after doing Looney Tunes Sting-style, Mark figured he might as well make an Eighties rock video to go along with it. We hope you enjoy it:
In a strange way, it's also a footnote to our Sinatra Century series. "I Taut I Taw A Puddy Tat" was written by Warren Foster, a stalwart of the Warner Bros cartoon division, and two men very familiar to Sinatra fans: Alan Livingston, the brother of Jay Livingston (composer of "Buttons And Bows", "Que Sera, Sera", etc), was the record company exec who signed Frank to Capitol and ushered in the singer's golden age; and Billy May was the arranger of some of Sinatra's best albums, including Come Fly With Me and Come Dance With Me. What Billy would have made of Mark's rocky version of his most successful composition, we cannot say, but we hope it would have brought a smile to his face.
So Mark thanks his beautiful cat Marvin, without whose encouragement it would never have occurred to him to go anywhere near this song. It's from his new album - Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin' Cats.
