"On Top of Spaghetti" is a ballad and children's song with the best-known performance by folk singer Tom Glazer with the Do-Re-Mi Children's Chorus in 1963. The song is sung to the tune of "On Top of Old Smoky". It is the tale of a meatball that was lost when "somebody sneezed". The song discusses what happened to the meatball after it fell off of a pile of spaghetti and rolled away, and employs hypallage in referring to the "poor little meatball".
| "On Top of Spaghetti" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Sharon and the Lollipops | |
| Published | 1962 |
| Composer(s) | music from "On Top of Old Smoky" |
| Lyricist(s) | Sharon Ruth, Philip Anders |
In 1961, to the same tune, Dick Biondi, The 9-Midnight DJ on WLS Chicago (1960–63), had recorded on IRC[1] "The Pizza Song". In 1962[2] Sharon and the Lollipops recorded "On Top of Spaghetti" with a lyric credit to Sharon Ruth.[3] It was released in June 1962 and reviewed by Billboard in its Limited Sales Potential column on June 23 of that year.[4] A version in Swedish was released in 1962 by Snopporna.[5]
The extended version by Tom Glazer with the Do-Re-Mi Children's Chorus was released on Kapp in 1963 with a contradictory lyric credit to Tom Glazer, but there were not any publishing references noted on the release labels.[6] That version reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.[7]