Hail to the Bus Driver

This one's a bit of a puzzler. The song, sung to the tune of "The More We Get Together" (which, itself, is to the tune of some German song, though I doubt that was what the author of the parody had in mind), goes about like this:


Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver!
Bus driver!
Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver man.

He yells and he cusses,
and smells up the busses,
Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver man.

He steps on the clutch
and the toilet goes flush.
Hail to the bus driver,
Bus driver man.

Those are the lyrics as presented by The Simpsons in the early 1990s. Another verse I've heard goes:

He drinks and he smokes
and he tells dirty jokes
Hail...

But here's the thing - as far as I can tell, the song was never collected or published before that episode of The Simpsons. I haven't found it in any collection of playground or camp songs so far. However, when that episode aired, I knew kids who claimed to have learned the song at camp the year before.

If it's not a Simpsons original, I suspect it was probably written by a camp counselor - it's a bit more sophisticated, and not quite as obscene, as what you normally see in a "for kids by kids" song (though I'm SURE kids have written more verses).

So is this truly a Simpsons original? Did you know it before that episode? What verses did you sing?
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3 comments:

  1. I remember hearing a variation of this in Tucson in the early 80s, well before The Simpsons even made an appearance on the Tracey Ullman show.

    He drinks and he cusses
    He wrecks all the busses
    ReplyDelete
  2. We alway sang it like so:

    Thank you Mr. Bus Driver
    Bus Driver
    Bus Driver
    Thank you Mr. Bus Driver
    for the great ride.

    He drinks and he cusses
    and wrecks all the busses --(like with JayVee above)

    We repeated the chorus, then had a few variations on the middle part which I can't recall, but which were along the same lines.
    ReplyDelete
  3. When I was an elementary student back in the 80s we used to sing this song all the time on the bus and sometimes get in trouble because of the words (which of course encourages us to sing it all the more along with 99 bottles of beer on the wall). The words we used were a little different however:

    Hail to the bus driver,
    Bus driver!
    Bus driver!
    Hail to the bus driver,
    Bus driver man.

    He drives up the steeples
    and kills all the people
    ReplyDelete

PLEASE tell us where and when you heard your version (ie, "Chicago, early 1950s). And please be aware that the information may end up in a book sooner or later.

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