Hoist the Black Flag: Ray Stevens Comes Aboard

Every history teacher needs a way to get the room quiet. Some of us use a bell. Ray Stevens used a pirate.

He was born Harold Ray Ragsdale in Clarkdale, Georgia, in 1939 — one of our own — and he has spent sixty-odd years proving that a funny song and a serious song are built out of exactly the same parts. Two Grammys, for Everything Is Beautiful and Misty. A catalog that runs from Ahab the Arab to Gitarzan to The Streak, which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in 1974. The man is an American treasure, and he is still cutting records at 87.

“The Pirate Song (I Want to Sing and Dance)” comes off I Have Returned, September 1985 on MCA — an album that went to number one on Billboard’s country chart. The song itself was written by C.W. Kalb Jr. and Carlene Kalb, and it’s about a pirate whose heart just isn’t in the pillaging. He’d rather do musical theater.

Now, let’s be honest with each other: this is not a history lesson. It is a novelty song about a man in tight pirate pants.

But that’s rather the point. You play it, the room laughs, and for the next thirty minutes you have their whole attention — which is when you tell them what that black flag on the screen actually meant. That it was a negotiation, not a decoration. That a ship ran up the black to say strike your colors and nobody gets hurt, and ran up the red to say the offer had expired. That “Jolly Roger” may come from jolie rouge, and that Blackbeard and Calico Jack each flew their own design the way a company files a trademark. The song buys you the room. Then you do the actual teaching.

That’s the whole idea behind what we’re building over at Dueling History — music as the hook, history as the payload. The video is up there now.

DuelingHistory.com — where the good stuff is landing these days.