I’m early on reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (900 pages, journey of a thousand miles), a fact I’m sharing because I came across a mention in it of a song called, “Would You Rather Be a Colonel With an Eagle on Your Shoulder or a Private With a Chicken on Your Knee?” Immediately wondered if this could be a real song, looked it up and so it is: first presented by Eddie Cantor in the 1918 edition of Ziegfeld Follies, released the following year by one “Eugene Buckley,” an alias apparently though why he would want to hide his involvement is a mystery because it’s a great record. Here it is, one of the big hits of 1919:
