He Do the Police in Different Voices/The Loud Family

Singer/songwriter Scott Miller has long cited T.S. Eliot as his "primary literary influence," and this is evident in the title of this song, from The Loud Family's 1993 album Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things. "He Do the Police in Different Voices" was Eliot's working title for a long poem that would ultimately be known to the world as The Waste Land. Eliot, in turn, seemed to be referencing Charles Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend , in which the elderly widow Betty Higden brags about her adopted son Sloppy's ability to read aloud: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices."

Submitted by Matthew Budman