4.8 • 642 Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2020
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
It’s sung everywhere from summer camps to soccer games. We dig into the song’s contested origins, and how it became such a hit.
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0:00.0 | Kevin Pierce was about five years old when someone in his family told him about the Great Chicago Fire. |
0:05.7 | It was just kind of a scary story for that little of a kid to hear just a story about a fire that completely leveled most of the city. |
0:18.6 | I kind of had difficulty getting to sleep that night. |
0:22.5 | And that was when Kevin learned this song. |
0:25.6 | One dark night when we were all in bed, Mrs. O'Leary left a lantern in the shed. |
0:31.3 | And when the cow kicked it over, she winked to her eye and said there'll be a hot time |
0:36.0 | in the old town tonight. |
0:42.1 | And so at that point, I just thought that's the great Chicago Fire song. |
0:45.2 | Kevin kept thinking that while he was growing up and well met. |
0:49.2 | This was just a little song about Mrs. O'Leary's cow, right? |
0:55.1 | But then, years later, he heard the University of Kansas marching band playing the same tune at a football game. |
0:56.0 | I figured out, okay, that makes no sense for University of Kansas to play a song about the |
1:09.4 | Great Chicago Fire. |
1:16.7 | Kevin looked up the song on Wikipedia and learned it was a hit way back in the 1890s, |
1:19.8 | and the original words had nothing to do with Mrs. O'Leary. |
1:24.9 | So Kevin asked Curiosity how that song turned into a ditty about the fire. |
1:29.9 | I'm reporter Robert Loriselle, and I've been investigating Kevin's question. |
1:35.2 | I've learned a lot about how songs get passed down through the generations by word of mouth. |
1:43.3 | It's hard to pinpoint their origins, but in this case, I did discover some clues about a mystery woman who may be the author. |
1:46.0 | And we'll get to her, but first... In 1896, a hit song was sweeping the country. |
1:57.9 | A hot time in the old town. |
2:00.2 | Three different white musicians claimed they'd |
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