The Death of Larry LaPrise

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a reader letting me know that composer Larry LaPrise had recently died at the age of 93. A one sentence message from an anonymous HotMail account addressed to news@stratcollector.com.

Had no idea who LaPrise was but figured there had to be a Stratocaster somewhere in the story.

Google tells me that LaPrise co-wrote the only song I'll dance to in public while sober: The Hokey Pokey.

Okay. Maybe LaPrise had a stash of near mint '54 Strats that will be coming up for sale in an estate auction.

Replied to the anonymous email asking if there was something to the story of LaPrise's death that I was missing, some connection to guitars. A few days later I received this cryptic response: "The Hokey Pokey was the B-side of Ray Anthony's 1953 hit, The Bunny Hop."

Great. 1953. Ray Anthony. Hokey Pokey. Bunny Hop. Maybe the phantom tipster knows me and is suggesting I add the Bunny Hop to my public dance repetoire.

Send another email asking why LaPrise's death is something I need to know. No reply to-date.

I "poke" a little further into the LaPrise story. Left brain in, left brain out.

Turns out that LaPrise (make that Roland Lawrence LaPrise) actually died at the age of 83, and not so recently (1996). Three writers get the credit for the Hokey Pokey lyrics: R. Lawrence LaPrise, Charles Peter Macak, and Taft Baker, the three members of LaPrise's group, The Ram Trio, that originally recorded the Hokey Pokey in 1949. Research fails to answer if LaPrise was a guitarist, but I doubt The Ram Trio was an early three-man Double Trouble.

Have to pull the plug on this curiosity, so I bring in the big gun - my wife, the serious newspaper journalist.

A few minutes later she calls me over to the computer and says the only "connection" to Stratocasters she can find is in a quote buried in an old Associated Press piece about LaPrise's death: "Jane Shattuc, a professor of mass cummunication at Emerson College, put it this way: 'There are two ways to understand the Hokey Pokey. You can see it as a childish game, typical of Americans' fascination with being inane, or kind of a refusal of adulthood. But, you can also see it as a celebration of taking pleasure in childhood irreverence. To paraphrase the song, I think that's what it's all about.'"

She gets up and reminds me that I have to mow the lawn today.