Swingin' the Alphabet


"Swingin' the Alphabet" is a novelty song sung by the Three Stooges in their 1938 short film Violent Is the Word for Curly. It is the only full-length song performed by the trio in their short films, and the only time they mimed to their own pre-recorded soundtrack. It contains a censor-baiting line; when the singers start ringing the changes on the letter "F" it seems as though an obscene word will result, but it does not.
For their 1959 album The Nonsense Songbook, the Stooges re-recorded the song with Moe, Larry, and Curly-Joe DeRita. The letters "G","J","L", "M" and the "Curly's a dope" line were omitted, and new lyrics featuring the letters "N," and "R", were added.
In 2005, Stooge film historian Richard Finegan identified the composer of the song as Septimus Winner, who had originally published it in 1875 as "The Spelling Bee". Septimus' own version, though, appears to have been based on an earlier version called "Ba-Be-Bi-Bo-Bu", which has a centuries-old tradition.

Origin

The lyrics of Septimus Winner's "Spelling Bee" were slightly different. A number of schools like Harvard University used this as one of their traditional songs, which itself may have originated centuries earlier in typesetting, as a very similar song or chant was used to help train apprentice printers in the structure of language, a tradition being described as "ancient" even as early as 1740:

Use in other media