the name game

The Name Game," or "The Banana Song", is a children's singalong rhyming game that creates variations on a person's name. It was written by singer Shirley Ellis with Lincoln Chase, and Ellis' recording, produced by Charles Calello, was released in late 1964 (see 1964 in music) as "The Name Game." The record went to number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 (The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, Joel Whitburn, 1996, p.204), and number 4 on the magazine's R&B charts in 1965. It was re-released in 1966 and again in 1973.

Ellis performed "The Name Game" on major television programs of the day, including Hullabaloo, American Bandstand, and Merv Griffin. "The Name Game" has been recorded by dozens of recording artists in the years since, notably Laura Branigan, whose version produced by Jeff Lorber, appearing on her 1987 album Touch, features a classroom of third-grade schoolchildren singing along to the tongue-twisting game. The Brazilian singer Xuxa recorded a song using the same play and same sample in the song "Jogo da Rima". Often covered by relative unknowns on collections of songs for children, other cover versions have been recorded by artists as diverse (and campy) as Dean Ford and the Gaylords (1965), Divine (1980), and Soupy Sales (2002). In 1982, Stacy Lattisaw took her "rap" recording of "Attack of the Name Game" to #79 on the Hot 100. In 1993, this song was used on television as an advertisement for Little Caesar's Pizza.