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Extry! Extry! And Allons! the road is before us, promising grand vistas from a half-century of song by that barrel of charm, that fabulous thrill, that greatest little headline in vaudeville, that five-foot-six bundle of dynamite — c’est moi! My name is The Viper. What’s yours?

And just what might I mean by a half-century? I mean 50 songs I have wrested from the void in my first 50 years of shufflin’ along this mortal coil. Fifty years isn’t forever, but it’s a mighty long time: spanning the distance from a jingle written for a high school Spanish assignment about what I claimed to be the world’s greatest nutcracker (“El Cortador”) to my most recent meditation on our slow slide to the grave (“The Older I Get (The Younger I Feel)”). Spare us El Cortador!

A bit more on the matter of this songbook’s scope:

LAW: First, only songs from within that half-century time frame. Second, only songs that have been performed live at least once by some permutation of The Viper and/or His Famous Orchestra, my neo-skiffle lab for whipping up alchemical admixtures of street-corner jazz, front-porch country, and meeting-hall agitprop. This meant excluding much-loved (by me, at least) non-Viper joints crafted in my Ryan Jerving persona like The Generics’s “Catatonic,” or Kissyfish’s “Lonely Little Vampire,” or The Kennett Brothers’s “((The Next Time I Drink) I’ll Start) Under the Table (to Save Myself a Trip),” along with other pulled together with The Subterraneans, Enzymatic Fly Vomit, The Corn Likkers, and the Paint Branch Ramblers.

ORDER: Songs are presented in alphabetical order, not chronologically, though the song notes in the appendices aim to give some sense of the era from whence each of these sonic offspring first offsprang.

And sprang they did: centripetally flung outward from the driving force of four strings and the sharp vinegar of truth, and sprung from a great upheaval in this writer’s soul, or, when that upheaval was not present, then from the work of any other songwriter which happened to be handy and easily adapted.

For each song, you’ll find a lead sheet of lyrics and melody, plus chord diagrams that will work for any concert, soprano, or tenor ukulele tuned G-C-E-A. Though, of course, you can play the chords themselves on any instrument that makes chords (guitar, mandolin, piano, xylophone made from human bones). The guidelines on the following page will walk you through how to work with these lead sheets, and you’ll find a full complement of the most commonly used ukulele chords in the appendices.

You’ll find further material online to help you find your way into these songs, including recordings, videos, source materials, and, maybe most importantly, a Midi mp3 for each song that I’ve exported directly from the same software I used to create the lead sheets in the first place. Which means the Midi track will follow the lead sheet exactly and will enable you to learn the melody and rhythm even if you’re more of a faker than a reader.

But enough of my yakking. All that’s left to say is that I greet you at the start of an epic Viperic journey — be not detain’d. Camerado, I give you my hand! And let’s check in again in another fifty years to see how we all ended up.