Album Review

Mark Deming [allmusic.com]

Allan Sherman's first album, My Son, the Folk Singer, was an unexpected smash hit upon its release in the fall of 1962, and Sherman wasted no time crafting a follow-up, with My Son, the Celebrity rushed into stores less than three months later. While it follows the pattern of Sherman's first album quite closely -- a handful of familiar tunes featuring broadly comic new lyrics, sung by Sherman in his endearing foghorn of a voice before an appreciative in-studio audience -- he had enough worthy material on hand that his second album is on a par with the debut, and Lou Bush's orchestrations are as clever and tightly rendered as before. While Sherman was hilariously obsessed with his own Jewishness on My Son, the Folk Singer, My Son, the Celebrity found him dipping his toes into less ethnically specific material, such as ''Mexican Hat Dance,'' ''Bronx Bird Watcher,'' and ''The Let's All Call Up A.T.&T. and Protest to the President March,'' though he was still capable of wringing laughter from the American Jewish experience, most notably on ''Harvey and Sheila,'' the story of an archetypical Semitic romance sung to the tune of no less than ''Hava Hagila.'' Sherman is also a more confident performer on this set, and not without reason -- My Son, the Celebrity was an equally witty follow-up to one of the most popular comedy albums of the 1960s, and made clear he was no flash in the pan.