The Elements

If I ran a game store I would play the song The Elements by Tom Lehrer.

"Sing the phonebook" is a phrase at the root of many compliments paid to singers. It's used to claim they could sing any old words and make it sound good, for example, "she could sing the phonebook and I'd pay to listen." While I've never heard that claim made about Tom Lehrer, he did sing the names of all the elements on the periodic table to paying audiences. The song, The Elements, is him singing those names to the tune of Major-General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance. He names every element on the table at the time the song was written in 1959, although he doesn't sing them in the order they appear on the periodic table. Instead, he puts them into a sequence to match the original tune's meter and to introduce alliteration. The song is equal parts hectic and humorous.

The Elements has been released on three of Tom Lehrer's albums. First, on 1959's More of Tom Lehrer and 1959's An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (it's a live album and the track has spoken comedy in addition to the song) and 1994's compilation album Tom Lehrer in Concert (it's the same track from An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer). The song has also appeared on compilation kids' and comedy albums.

The Elements (More of Tom Lehrer version) on Google Play





The Elements lyrics

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorous and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and caesium

And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, and
Tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium

There's sulphur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper
Tungsten, tin and sodium

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered