The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (November 2006)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

"The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" is a song composed by Charles Randolph Grean and performed by Leonard Nimoy, telling the story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures in J. R. R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit. The recording originally appeared on The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy (Dot Records Cat. DLP 25835, 1968), the second of Nimoy's albums on Dot Records. It was also released as a single (Dot Records Cat. #45-17028), backed with a "modern thought-image" folk song called "Cotton Candy".

A year before the recording was commercially released, Nimoy lip-synched to the recording during a guest appearance on the July 28, 1967 episode of Malibu U, a short-lived variety television series. This segment survives as a "music video" and shows Nimoy (wearing his Star Trek hairstyle as the series was in the midst of production of its second season at the time) and a group of color-coordinated young women, all wearing plastic elf (or Vulcan) ears, singing and dancing on a beach. Since its rediscovery on the BBC2 documentary Funk Me Up Scotty and propagation over the Internet, it has become a relatively well-known example of 1960s camp. An excerpt from the musical number is also included in the documentary Ringers: Lord of the Fans about The Lord of the Rings fandom.

Leonard Nimoy in the music video

Fans of Nimoy were intrigued by the fact (revealed in interviews) that Nimoy had read Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and been exceedingly impressed by it. From approximately 1968 to 1973, several Nimoy and Star Trek fanzine writers and editors (notably Regina Marvinny's Nimoyan Federation) discussed the idea of a live-action The Lord of the Rings film, with Nimoy playing Aragorn, and there was a brief letter-writing campaign.

[edit] References to the song

An audio clip of the song was played as part of a question on an episode of Jeopardy! aired January 5, 2006.^{[citation needed]}
The video was also a feature on VH1's Web Junk 20.^{[citation needed]}