"Ich bin ein Musikante" was collected in Silesia by Ludwig Erk and Wilhelm Irmer, and published in Die deutschen Volkslieder mit ihren Singweisen (1838).
[2] Charles Randolph Grean decided to produce a version of this song; he recruited Tom Glazer to write it (starting "I am a fine musician, I practice every day"), and it was performed by Dinah Shore, Betty Hutton, Tony Martin, and Phil Harris as The Musicians (1951).
This was later performed on The Dick Van Dyke Show (6 March and 18 December 1963),[3] and Sesame Street (21 November 1969).
[10] The song was recorded by Black Lace, a British pop group from Ossett in West Yorkshire, in 1989 and reached #52 in the UK singles charts.
[11] Each verse begins with the following chorus lines, divided between the lead singer ("The Music Man") and the audience.
It is sometimes performed in cabaret with the audience challenging the artistes to ever more extravagant – and difficult – renditions of, for example, the flugelhorn.
"Vi äro musikanter" is a Swedish translation, typically sung when dancing around the Christmas tree and the Midsummer pole.
[13] The song has been published several times, including: Other similar songs, perhaps based to varying extents on the original German version, include Peter Kennedy's "The German Musicianer" in Folk Songs of Britain and Northern Ireland (1975),[14] and Walter Greenaway's "The Wonderful Musician" (1871), which has a chorus that begins: "A big drum, a kettle drum, the fiddle, flute, and piccolo, piano, harp, harmonium and many more beside".