“Blue-Tail Fly”

About five years ago tubby troubadour Burl Ives first heard The Blue-Tail Fly: When I was young I used to wait On master and give him his plate, And pass the bottle when he got dry, And brush away the blue-tail fly.

One chanced to bite him on the thigh; The devil take the blue-tail fly!

He died and the jury wondered why The verdict was the blue-tail fly.

Ives managed to talk 20th Century-Fox out of tampering with The Blue-Tail Fly, though he did have to bowdlerize his other favorite, Foggy, Foggy Dew, an old Irish ballad.