Pete and Ben find themselves pulled between critical poles on this episode, enjoying the charisma of the guest-star but lamenting her musical choices, and also finding that while the backstage runner has aged poorly, the UK Spot might be the greatest musical secret the Muppet Show has ever concealed from American audiences.

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Teresa Brewer can be seen performing “Music Music Music” with a mildly handsy Ed Sullivan on his show in 1950, or instead can be watched giving it the full teenaged, slightly less discomfited version here. (We also shan’t link to the strangely colorized version that’s in the description.) There’s a very analogue television recording of the disco version that’s also a little hard to watch for totally different reasons, so we’ll instead allow you to compare tracks with this clean version with boring visuals. Secondhand Songs thinks the earliest version of the song is from 1949, and you can get a sense of the nickelodeon, beer-hall style of the song from there. As Pete notes, while her husband Peter Thiele helped mastermind the disco remix of her previous hit, he was a jazz producer who co-wrote Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”, and there are some good write-ups of their jazz collaborations, including as a prominent note in her obituary.

The different versions of “Cotton Fields” are listed, always invaluably, on SecondHand Songs, which is how I found out about the vastly superior Odetta version performed and recorded at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959.

Animal plays The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” on the drums in this episode, presaging his performance of it on the Muppets’ Kermit: Unpigged album, played in contrast to Steve Whitmire’s docile, acoustic interpretation. This article provides some historical context for Jimi Hendrix’s legendary performance of the song at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and watching the video from the concert film is very interesting, especially the footage included by the filmmakers of the audience’s response.

Pete and Ben are both blown away by how much fun Irving Fields’ song “Cheesecake” is, and that it was not a novelty song from someone like Spike Jones, but legitimately performed by Louis Armstrong. Fields’ autobiography entry about writing the song while riding a bicycle is fun, but equally wild as Armstrong performing the song is his pullquote in this oral history of “Cheesecake”: “Cheesecake is my favorite part of Judaism.” If you’d like to see Louis sing “Cheesecake” on a segment on Bing Crosby’s television show, you’ll see how the arrangement seems to have always included someone else coming in on the choric “Cheesecake!” bit, in this case, YouTube indicating that it was one Tyree Glenn.