“Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” / “Fill Your Heart” – Doyle’s Space: Music Hall of Fame – SOS Award

Tiny Tim’s “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” / “Fill Your Heart” was released by Reprise Records as single 0679 on April 3, 1968. It paired a revival of a 1929 popular song with a brand-new composition by Biff Rose and Paul Williams. Both recordings appeared on Tiny Tim’s debut album, God Bless Tiny Tim, which was also released in 1968 and was produced by Richard Perry.

The single became Tiny Tim’s major commercial breakthrough, with the A-side reaching No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it his only Top 20 pop hit and his signature recording. The record is especially interesting because the two sides represent very different generations of popular music: the A-side came from the Tin Pan Alley and early Hollywood era,

while the B-side came directly from the late-1960s singer-songwriter world. “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” was written by Joe Burke, who composed the music, and Al Dubin, who wrote the lyrics. It was published in 1929 and became famous through the Warner Bros. musical film Gold Diggers of Broadway, in which guitarist and singer Nick Lucas performed the song. Lucas’s recording became a major hit,

reaching No. 1 in the United States and remaining at the top of the chart for ten weeks. Other artists also had charting versions that year, making “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” an established popular standard long before Tiny Tim encountered it. The original song is simply a romantic invitation: the singer wants to meet his sweetheart among the tulips,

away from the rest of the world, and wonders whether a kiss in the moonlight would be forgiven. Its original meaning was romantic and playful, not strange or frightening. Tiny Tim had been performing the song since about 1958, making it part of his repertoire nearly a decade before he became nationally famous. He recorded his version at TTG Studios in Los Angeles on December 19, 1967, during the sessions for God Bless Tiny Tim. Richard Perry produced the recording, which runs for less than two minutes.

Tiny Tim’s interpretation completely changed the character of the song. He sang in his extraordinarily high falsetto, using exaggerated phrasing and the ukulele-associated style that became one of the trademarks of his public persona. Interestingly, Tiny Tim later said that he did not actually play the ukulele on the studio recording; a professional musician played it. The performance was nevertheless closely identified with Tiny Tim’s own stage act. The turning point came when Tiny Tim appeared on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on February 5, 1968.

His performance of “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” introduced millions of television viewers to his unusual appearance, voice and musical style. The contrast between Tiny Tim and the contemporary pop culture of 1968 was enormous. Rock music was moving toward heavier sounds, psychedelic experimentation and increasingly sophisticated studio production,

while Tiny Tim seemed to have stepped out of an earlier era of popular entertainment. His performance could be interpreted as comedy, nostalgia, genuine musical enthusiasm or some combination of all three. Tiny Tim himself had a deep interest in the music of the 1920s and 1930s, so the performance was not simply a joke built around an old song.

The single reached No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. That ranking is particularly remarkable because Tiny Tim was taking a song that had been a No. 1 hit for Nick Lucas in 1929 and turning it into a hit nearly forty years later without substantially modernizing its basic identity. “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” was Tiny Tim’s only Top 20 Billboard pop single. He subsequently had several other chart appearances, including “

Bring Back Those Rockabye Baby Days,” which reached No. 95 later in 1968, and “Great Balls of Fire,” which reached No. 85 in 1969, but neither came close to the success of “Tip-Toe.” The A-side therefore became not merely a hit but the defining recording of his career.

The B-side, “Fill Your Heart,” deserves almost as much attention as the hit side because its subsequent history is extraordinary. The song was written by Biff Rose and Paul Williams. Tiny Tim recorded it for God Bless Tiny Tim, and his recording appeared as the B-side of “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me.” Unlike the A-side, it was a contemporary composition.

Its message is one of love, emotional openness, happiness and freedom from fear. The basic idea is that people can free themselves from destructive thoughts by filling their lives with love and gentleness. It is a sincere and optimistic song, and Tiny Tim performs it much more straightforwardly than his bizarrely theatrical treatment of “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me.”

There is an important chronology concerning “Fill Your Heart.” Tiny Tim’s recording appeared on God Bless Tiny Tim in April 1968, while Biff Rose’s own recording appeared later that year on his debut album, The Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side, released October 15, 1968. Consequently, Tiny Tim’s version preceded Rose’s album version by roughly six months. Rose and Williams were the songwriters,

but Tiny Tim helped bring the composition to a much larger public audience through his successful album and single. Rose’s album itself reached No. 75 on the Billboard Top LPs chart. “Fill Your Heart” did not become a Billboard pop hit for Tiny Tim, so there is no comparable Hot 100 ranking for the B-side. Its importance instead comes from what happened later.

David Bowie recorded “Fill Your Heart” for his 1971 album Hunky Dory. Bowie’s version is the only song on Hunky Dory that he did not write himself. It opens the album’s second side and replaced Bowie’s own song “Bombers” late in the album’s development. Bowie had already been performing “Fill Your Heart” live by 1970, demonstrating that he was familiar with the

composition well before making the Hunky Dory recording. Bowie’s version is substantially different in presentation from Tiny Tim’s. It features Rick Wakeman on piano, Mick Ronson’s string arrangement and Bowie’s saxophone, giving the song a much fuller early-1970s art-pop treatment. The arrangement is energetic and deliberately bright,

and “Fill Your Heart” provides a striking contrast with the more introspective material surrounding it on Hunky Dory. Bowie’s recording became vastly better known than Tiny Tim’s B-side version and gave the Rose-Williams composition a permanent place in rock history. The connection is especially fascinating because the song had first appeared on the B-side of Tiny Tim’s only Top 20 hit and

then became the only non-Bowie composition on Hunky Dory. The single also had variations in different markets. The American Reprise release paired “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” with “Fill Your Heart,” but some international issues used different B-sides. One alternate pairing substituted “Ever Since You Told Me That You Love Me (I’m a Nut)” for “Fill Your Heart.” Collectors therefore need to distinguish the American Reprise 0679 release from the various foreign issues.

The principal American pairing remains the historically important one because it links Tiny Tim’s signature hit directly with the song that David Bowie would later record. One of the most interesting pieces of trivia is that Tiny Tim’s seemingly bizarre career was built partly on his serious interest in forgotten popular music. He knew an enormous amount about early American popular songs and

performers and frequently revived material that most young listeners in the 1960s had never heard. “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me” was therefore not simply an arbitrary novelty song chosen because it sounded funny in falsetto. Tiny Tim had been performing it for years before television made him famous. His performance exaggerated its period character, but the affection behind it was genuine. The two sides of the single consequently tell two very different stories. “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me”

reached backward to 1929, when Nick Lucas had taken the song to No. 1, and Tiny Tim transformed that old standard into a No. 17 hit in 1968. “Fill Your Heart,” meanwhile, came from the contemporary songwriting partnership of Biff Rose and Paul Williams, was recorded by Tiny Tim in 1968, recorded by Rose later that year, and then became part of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory in 1971. The A-side became Tiny Tim’s permanent signature, while the B-side acquired an entirely separate afterlife through Bowie. Few novelty-era singles have such an unusual combination of musical history on their two sides.