Halloween turns my thoughts to the spooky, creepy music of the season. In my experience, there are really two types of what one might call spooky music: classical compositions and pop, or even “novelty,” songs. Let me take you down these rabbit holes. Maybe some of these selections are familiar to you. If they are, then you get a little trip down memory lane, and if they’re not, then you are in for some fun new stuff!

My exposure to creepy or scary classical music started early. When I was a kid, maybe five or six years old, my parents started taking me almost every year to see Walt Disney’s epic movie, “Fantasia,” along with my big sister and little brother. My parents were classical music fans. My father of blessed memory, in particular, was a serious student of classical piano, and actually considered a career as a concert pianist. The high point of his career was a recital with the Boston Pops at age 23. Dad didn’t really have the temperament to be a road warrior, so he opted for chemical engineering, which allowed him to support a family. I don’t actually know why we went to see that movie every year, but it was my introduction to one of the great pieces of classical music that is associated with Halloween: the instantly recognizable “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” an extraordinary organ piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. Disney used an orchestral arrangement, of course, which was conducted, as were all of the “Fantasia” pieces, by the famous Leopold Stokowski.

This version of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” is a monstrous performance by organist Xavér Varnus in the Berlin Cathedral, or “Dom.”

There are two other great spooky pieces of classical music associated with this movie. One is “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by the French composer Paul Dukas. If you’ve ever seen “Fantasia,” you’ll likely associate this piece with the chaotic scenes of Mickey Mouse fighting with enchanted broomsticks. Here’s Kurt Masur leading the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig in this piece.

Mickey and the enchanted broomsticks in Walt Disney’s iconic “Fantasia.”

The other piece of spooky music associated with “Fantasia” is “Night on Bald Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky, the great Russian symphonist. Watch Wayne Marshall leading the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France in Paris. The inner workings of Disney’s visual imagination are incredible; I was really scared when I watched this piece as a kid! The other thing that came close, although it wasn’t tied to anything but the film score, are the scenes in “The Wizard of Oz” with the flying monkeys… enough to scare the daylights out of a little boy.

Okay, that’s our classical deep dive. Now let’s go to another side of the musical spectrum and look at goofy spooky pop songs. My Top 3 short list is here:

#1 Monster Mash

#2 Witch Doctor

#3 Purple People Eater

My favorite, “Monster Mash,” came from Bobby Pickett. Per Smoothradio.com, “Pickett was a young actor, who sang with a band named the Cordials in the evening while he auditioned during the day. One night, while performing with his band, he acted out a monologue in the style of horror movie actor Boris Karloff, while performing the Diamonds’ ‘Little Darlin’. The audience were big fans, and his band member Lenny Capizzi encouraged Pickett to do more of the same. Pickett and Capizzi then composed ‘Monster Mash’, and recorded it with Gary S Paxton, pianist Leon Russell, Johnny MacRae, Rickie Page, and Terry Berg, named ‘The Crypt-Kickers’.”

As you can imagine from the watching the video, Bobby Pickett’s facial contortions were as well known at the time as his song.

A little more research turned up something else I didn’t know: Evidently, “Monster Mash” was a response to two other hit tunes of the early ‘60s: “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles and Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time,” itself a spinoff of sorts from James Brown’s “Mashed Potato” hit. Brown’s version was released in 1959, here’s a 1960 version of it.

David Seville was the stage name of a singer/songwriter named Ross Bagdasarian. He was also the creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks. His song “Witch Doctor” was a big hit in 1958 for Liberty Records and nearly saved the label from bankruptcy. He recorded his vocals at half-speed on a tape recorder on which he had spent $200 (a great deal of money at the time) and then played them back at regular speed, raising his voice an octave and making that goofy sound with which you are all likely familiar (as he used the same technique with Alvin and his furry friends).

David Seville with turntables and microphone used to alter his voice by raising it an octave, the same technique he would use for “Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

Sheb Wooley was a singer-songwriter-actor most famous for his single, “Purple People Eater,” recorded using the same silly technique as David Seville’s hits. Wooley also had number of country hits and was a regular on the “Hee Haw” television show in the 1960s and ‘70s. When he first pitched “Purple People Eater” to MGM Records, they demurred, saying that it wasn’t the sort of song with which they wanted to be associated. It was the young people who worked there who made the decision for the label: up to fifty of them would gather and listen to the song at lunchtime. That was enough to get the executives to release the song as a single.

Sheb Wooley’s Purple People Eater was saved from obscurity once record executives saw what a crowd-pleaser the song was with the younger set during lunch time at the office.

Did you know that Judy Garland sang this song too? She did! Here’s a recording of a live performance from 1959. If the song is good enough for her, it’s good enough for me.

Wishing you and yours a creepy, spooky, one-eyed, one-horned Halloween!