Mike Tuggle on By Request

I found some notes in my journal on Mike Tuggle, I was probably an MC and was introducing him to a reading because I asked him the usual, when and where he was born etc., 1938, Tulsa. And we got distracted. I asked him why he always closed his set with that By Request song, and where did he learn it from. Mike said he learned it from his Pa, in Oklahoma. He said, when I was little, my dad and mom didn’t have a radio, but they would sing songs in the car. And the last song he’d always sing was always By Request.  It was an absurd and scary song, the idea of Josephus, an academic was. It’s absurd and final and funny. Ending on cholera by request. It made me remember the song on the brevity of life. It made me think—is that all there is? He said his grandfather was part Choctaw, and Lula was half Cherokee. But my grandpa on the European side was an Indian hater, big ham of a man who invented the first Gott cooler, a large thermos and he sold his idea to Gott’s department for $100. He invented the double-ended wrench for fuselage on airplanes. JW Tuggle married Martha J Booth. JW looked a lot like me as a young man. Edwin Booth was an actor, and he did a great Hamlet. But it was Junius Brutus Booth, not a relative, who sang the folk song and passed it on.

• Folklore Parody song to tune of Auld Lang Syne
• Note, this is filed in 2001, but I didn’t finish it until 2014, but it made more sense to file it with the other folklore.