She first came to notice in the UK with her 1970 cover of the Rolling Stones song Ruby Tuesday, which I featured here.
Her biggest UK hit was Brand New Key, parodied by The Wurzels as The Combine Harvester.
I’ve chosen her second UK hit (no 39 in 1970) What Have They Done to My Song Ma (aka Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma) partly for the verse in French but also since I always wanted to write a parody of it entitled Look What They’ve Done to My Team Ma. (By ‘team’ I meant the mighty Sons of the Rock.) I never got round to that of course.
Melanie: What Have They Done to My Song Ma
Melanie Anne Safka-Schekeryk (Melanie): 3/2/1947 – January 23/1/2024. So it goes.
Pedant’s corner:- Both of the song’s titles surely ought to have a comma after ‘Song’ and the ‘what’ one, a question mark at its end.
From the sublime (Al Stewart, last two weeks) to the gorblimey.
I’d almost forgotten about this till the good lady said she’d heard it on the radio this week
The Wurzels were a band from Somerset – a traditional rural farming county – who dubbed their style Scrumpy and Western after the name for a type of cider and a USian music genre.
A parody of Melanie (Safka)’s Brand New Key from 1971 with lyrics more appropriate to agriculture this, believe it or not, was actually a number one hit in the UK in 1976. For three weeks!
Bits of it are still funny, though. I especially like the spoken, “I just can’t wait till I get me ‘ands on your laaaaand,” towards the end.
The Wurzels: The Combine Harvester
Another Wurzels parody, this time of Una Paloma Blanca, got to number three in 1976.
The Wurzels: I am a Cider Drinker
There are clips on You Tube of the Wurzels performing this on TV but on one of them they are introduced by a paedophile and the other is incomplete.
Another one from 1970 but this is one of the great cover versions. A Jagger-Richard composition, Melanie (Safka) invests Ruby Tuesday with much more emotion than Jagger ever could.
