“The Name Game” was a popular novelty song released by Shirley Ellis in 1964. The song rose all the way to number three on the Billboard Hot 100. Ellis performed it on American Bandstand, The Merv Griffin Show, and Hullabaloo. It went on to become an iconic children’s sing-along that is still popular to this day.
The song was eventually covered by Jessica Lange in American Horror Story: Asylum. When speaking about the scene with Vulture, Lange admitted she wasn’t sure whether it would work. “I thought, Have we crossed a line? Are we gonna actually be able to pull this off? It’s wild.”
She continued, “I’m glad I didn’t completely humiliate myself. [Ryan Murphy] wanted very much for me to look like Dusty Springfield. How did it come about? Well, I had said to him early on — because we did that one little flashback of a musical number establishing that she had been a singer in a band in the forties — I said, ‘Let me do one more number. Just because everything we do is so grim.’ It’s so much fun to sing, even though I’m not a singer. So he said all right, and then out of the blue came this.”
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Partially due to American Horror Story, the song is still popular today with 3.7 million views on YouTube. As one listener said, “I learned this from my elementary school friends in the 1960s. Never knew where it came from. Now I know. This is what the Internet is for!” Another said, “I hope this song withstands the tests of time in order to make it to future generations. Singing this song and playing the name game with my mom was one of my happiest memories as a child.”
Ellis had a few more hits throughout her career, including “The Clapping Song,” which sold over a million copies, and “The Nitty Gritty.” Ellis retired from the music industry in 1968. In 2005, she died of natural causes at the age of 76.
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