The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

"The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" is a song composed by Charles R. Grean and performed by Leonard Nimoy, telling the story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures in J.R.R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit. The recording originally appeared on The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy (Dot Records Cat. DLP 25835, 1968), the second of Nimoy's albums on Dot Records. It was also released as a single (Dot Records Cat. #45-17028), backed with a "modern thought-image" folk song called "Cotton Candy".

A year before the recording was commercially released, Nimoy lip-synched to the recording during a guest appearance on the July 28, 1967 episode of Malibu U, a short-lived variety television series. This segment survives as a "music video" and shows Nimoy (wearing his Star Trek hairstyle as the series was in the midst of production of its second season at the time) and a group of color-coordinated photogenic young women, all wearing plastic Vulcan (or elf) ears, singing and dancing on a beach. (One of the dancers on this series was Erin Gray who later gained fame in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century though it's not known if she participated in this particular musical number). Since its rediscovery on the BBC2 documentary Funk Me Up Scotty and propagation over the Internet, it has become a relatively well-known example of 1960s camp. An excerpt from the musical number is also included in the documentary Ringers: Lord of the Fans about Lord of the Rings fandom.

Fans of Nimoy were intrigued by the fact (revealed in interviews) that Nimoy had read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and been exceedingly impressed by it. From approximately 1968 to 1973, several Nimoy and Star Trek fanzine writers and editors (notably Regina Marvinny's Nimoyan Federation) discussed the idea of a live-action Lord of the Rings film, with Nimoy playing Aragorn, and there was a brief letter-writing campaign.

An audio clip of the song was played as part of a question on an episode of Jeopardy! aired January 5, 2006. The video was also a feature on VH1's Web Junk 20.

A portion also appears in a videoclip by the hobbit-themed rap group Lords of the Rhymes and in Joseph Blanchette's One Ring to Rule Them All series.

It was also aired at the end of Sarah Cox's appearance on Room 101.

A local radio station in [[Jacksonville], called "Cool" 100.7 declared the song "the worst song ever recorded in the history of recorded music."

See also

• Leonard Nimoy discography

External links

• The Original Music Video
• Spock's Greatest Hits An indepth look at Nimoy's career with Dot Records.