This is the latest installment in the Songs of Sacrilege series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a song that is irreverent towards religion, makes fun of religion, pokes fun at sincerely held religious beliefs, or challenges the firmly held religious beliefs of others, please send me an email.
Today’s Song of Sacrilege is It Ain’t Necessarily So by Cab Calloway. Originally performed and written by George and Ira Gershwin.
Lyrics
It ain’t necessarily so, (repeat)
De t’ings dat yo’ li’ble
To read in de Bible,
It ain’t necessarily so.
Li’l David was small, but oh my! (repeat)
He fought big Goliath
Who lay down an’ dieth!
Li’l David was small, but oh my!
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale, (repeat)
Fo’ he made his home in
Dat fish’s abdomen.
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale.
Li’l Moses was found in a stream, (repeat)
He floated on water
Till Ole Pharaoh’s daughter
She fished him, she says, from that stream.
It ain’t necessarily so, (repeat)
Dey tell all you chillun
De debble’s a villun,
But ’tain’t necessarily so.
To get into Hebben don’ snap for a sebben!
Live clean! Don’ have no fault.
Oh, I takes dat gospel
Whenever it’s poss’ble,
But wid a grain of salt.
Methus’lah lived nine hundred years, (repeat)
But who calls dat livin’
When no gal’ll give in
To no man what’s nine hundred years?
I’m preachin’ dis sermon to show,
It ain’t nessa, ain’t nessa,
ain’t nessa, ain’t nessa,
Ain’t necessarily so.
—Music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin (1935)
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I’ve heard the song before. One thing about it is the way the Gershwins wrote, and Cab Calloway performed, it, the questions can sound almost innocent: what kids would ask.