Ya Got Trouble
| "Ya Got Trouble" | |
|---|---|
| Song | |
| from the album The Music Man | |
| Released | 1957 |
| Genre | Patter song[1] Show tune |
| Songwriter | Meredith Willson |
"Ya Got Trouble" is a patter song by Meredith Willson from the 1957 Broadway musical The Music Man and its subsequent film adaptations in 1962 and 2003.
The song is a slippery slope fallacy presented by con man Harold Hill, posing as a bandleader and traveling salesman, as he tries to scam a small town in Iowa. He argues that by forming a boy's marching band (and purchasing musical instruments from him), he will protect the youth of the community from being corrupted by the arrival of a pool table at the local billiard hall.[2][3]
Composition
Willson considered eliminating a long piece of dialogue from his draft of The Music Man about the serious trouble facing River City parents. However, he realized it sounded like a lyric and transformed it into "Ya Got Trouble".[4]
Title variations
The song is sometimes listed as "(Ya Got) Trouble".[5][3] The original Broadway cast album lists the song title as "Trouble", both on the record jacket and label. "You Got Trouble" is a common misspelling of the song title.
See also
- Bevo – Non-alcoholic malt beverage or near beer
- Dan Patch – American Standardbred racehorse
- Fawcett Publications – American publishing company that first published the humor magazine Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
- Knickerbockers – Baggy-kneed breeches popular in the early 20th-century
- Piper cubeba – Species of flowering plant used in cubeb cigarettes
- Sen-Sen – Type of breath freshener
- Tailor-made cigarette
References
- ^ Wolff 2024, p. 132.
- ^ Holmes, Linda (2014). "Kids, Pants, Booze, Music: Trouble In River City And Always". NPR. Retrieved 2026-03-21.
- ^ a b Ruiz, Alexis Mikulski (2025). "Inside the Very Creepy 'Music Man' Moment in 'It: Welcome to Derry'". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2026-03-21.
- ^ Bloom & Vlastnik 2004, pp. 215–16.
- ^ Hischak 2008, p. 515.
Bibliography
- Bloom, Ken; Vlastnik, Frank (2004). Broadway musicals: the 101 greatest shows of all time. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. ISBN 978-1-57912-390-1.
- Carsello, Daniel (Fall 2021). ""But He Doesn't Know the Territory": The Story Behind Meredith Willson's The Music Man; Broadway Edition". The Bulletin of the Society for American Music. 47 (3). Pittsburgh: 13–14 – via ProQuest.
- Hischak, T.S. (2008). The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 9780195335330. Retrieved 2015-06-19.
- Wolff, Tamsen O. (2024). "8 'Imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds': Rap, Patter, and Hyper Diction in Musical Theatre". In Groth, Helen; Murphet, Julian (eds.). The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-3995-0230-6.
Further reading
- Knapp, Raymond (2005). The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton University Press. JSTOR j.ctv39x6z2. Retrieved 2026-03-11.
- Willson, Meredith (2020-09-22). "But He Doesn't Know the Territory": The Story behind Meredith Willson's The Music Man. University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/j.ctv15kxfxv. ISBN 978-1-4529-6502-4. Retrieved 2026-03-11.