“Shame & Scandal” by Madness

Madness put their own ska bounce on "Shame & Scandal" in 2005 for The Dangermen Sessions, Volume One, and it's a song with a long, crooked family tree. Sir Lancelot first wrote it for the 1943 film I Walked with a Zombie, when it went by "Fort Holland Calypso Song" and spread the dirt on a well-known clan living on San Sebastian, a Caribbean island.

In 1962 the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Melody wrote fresh verses while keeping the tune and the chorus, and both men share the credit here. Melody turned it into a farce: a young Puerto Rican man keeps asking his father's blessing to marry, and every time the old man has to confess the girl is really his sister, a fact kept from the boy's mother. A Florida history museum later reckoned no calypso had been recorded more often.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.