‘Napoleon XIV’, recording engineer who had a hit with They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! – obituary

Jerry Samuels, who has died aged 84, was an American recording engineer who, under the pseudonym Napoleon XIV, concocted the irritatingly memorable and deeply creepy one-hit wonder They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!

Issued as a single in the summer of 1966, the deranged ditty (it could hardly be called a song) consisted of “Napoleon”, accompanied by nothing more than a snare drum, a tambourine and hands clapping in unison, in a voice spiralling into a sort of manic falsetto, telling of the heartbreak, misery and subsequent mental disintegration that leads him to be consigned to a “funny farm where life is beautiful all the time”.

Only in the final line is it revealed that the cause of his angst is not a woman, but a runaway dog: “They’ll find you yet, and when they do, they’ll put you in the ASPCA, you mangy mutt!”

The single (whose B-side, !aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT ot gnimoC er’yehT consisted of the A-side played backwards) shot to No 3 in the US charts and No 4 in the UK charts before registering the biggest drop in chart history when US radio stations stopped playing it following complaints from mental health organisations.

From the 1970s it became a staple of radio broadcasts and compilation albums by a US DJ and novelty-record specialist calling himself Dr Demento, along with other Napoleon XIV numbers such as I Live in a Split-Level Head and The Nuts on My Family Tree, none of which troubled the charts.

When last heard of Samuels was working as a piano-bar entertainer for senior citizens groups.

Jerrold Samuels was born on May 3 1938 in the Bronx area of New York. He learnt to play the piano as a child and began his career performing in local bars. In 1956 he recorded his first song, Puppy Love (not the Donny Osmond song), for the Vik Records label.

By his 20s he was working at Associated Recording Studios in New York as a recording engineer and songwriter, co-writing under a pseudonym As If I Didn’t Know, which became a hit for Adam Wade in 1961, and writing The Shelter of Your Arms, a big 1964 hit for Sammy Davis Jr.

Samuels began work on They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!, as an experiment with new editing technology that would let him raise the pitch on a song recording without changing the tempo. He adopted the name Napoleon XIV, credited his composition to N Bonaparte and persuaded Warner Bros Records to release it.

The success of the single inspired Warner Bros to issue an eponymous album including other songs by Napoleon XIV on a mental illness theme (I’m in Love With My Little Red Tricycle, Photogenic, Schizophrenic You, and so on) and a riposte to the title track entitled I’m Happy They Took You Away, Ha- Haaa! by a female artist going by the name of Josephine XV.

The album was not a success.

For many years Samuels made a living playing standards at piano bars, latterly in what The Philadelphia Inquirer described as “senior living facilities”. At one stage he was said to have founded and run a business selling “roach clips” – metal devices for holding marijuana cigarette butts.

In 1984 he created his own talent agency in Philadelphia for performers on the “senior living” circuit.

In 1988 he recorded a sequel to his greatest hit, They’re Coming to Take Me Again Ha-Haaa!, but as Dr Demento observed, “it was not really very good... Still, he created a masterpiece and nobody can take that away from him.”

He is survived by his second wife Bobbie and by two sons. Another son predeceased him.

Jerry Samuels, aka Napoleon XIV, born May 3 1938, died March 10 2023