Little Jimmy Dickens – May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose album art
“May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose” is a 1965 novelty song written by Neal Merritt (1930–1975) and performed by Little Jimmy Dickens (1920–2015). From Wikipedia:
It was Dickens’ most successful single on the U.S. country music chart. It spent two weeks at No. 1 that November, and stayed on the chart for a total of 18 weeks. […]
The song features three verses, each of which mentions an incident where Dickens (the narrator) acts in a cheap and/or rude manner that insults the other person:
• In the first verse, Dickens sees a beggar and proceeds to give him only a penny.
• In the second verse, Dickens gets a call from his laundryman, who returns $100 that Dickens left in his clothes. Dickens gives him 10 cents, to compensate him for the phone call.
• In the final verse, Dickens asks a cabdriver to rush so he can catch a train; the driver is ticketed for speeding, while Dickens stands by, waiting for the change from his fare.The chorus is an insult, said back to Dickens, for his cheapness.
The sleeve design for the homonymous album combines an illustration of the song’s protagonists by Jack Davis with two Photo-Lettering faces that were quite fresh in 1965: The top-heavy Zenedipity by Ed Benguiat and the slab serif Satanic by Frank Bartuska.
The French single release maintains the typography from the US album cover. Designer unknown.
