Carole King / A Natural Woman: The Ode Collection 1968-1976 / 1975
Alligators All Around
gleeful, manic, comic
This is Carole King's musical setting of Maurice Sendak's alphabetized catalogue of alligator antics, originally written for the animated special and later stage musical Really Rosie. The lyric is structurally a nursery mnemonic — one alliterative verb phrase per letter — that doubles as a comic portrait of a rowdy household in miniature.
childhood chaos domestic mischief alphabet as form play and misbehavior innocence
Who's speaking
There is no first-person narrator; the voice is a chanting, list-making observer describing an unseen family of alligators, addressed outward to a child listener or audience.
What happens
The song has no plot in the conventional sense — it moves strictly by the alphabet, letter by letter, each one yielding a tiny vignette of alligator behavior. Taken together the vignettes sketch an arc from mundane chores toward escalating misbehavior (quarreling, tantrums, vanity) before dissolving into pure sound at the end of the alphabet, then snapping back to the title phrase as a refrain.
How it's built
The verse is built as an unbroken alphabetic chain, four letters per line-grouping, with no chorus in the usual sense — the title phrase itself functions as both opening tag and closing refrain, repeated insistently at the end like a chant fading out.
Craft
- alliteration
- Every entry pairs the letter with a word starting on that same sound, which is the engine of the whole lyric and what makes it singable as an alphabet primer.
- catalogue/list form
- The song abandons narrative causality entirely in favor of accumulation, letting rhythm and comic juxtaposition do the work that plot would in a normal song.
- onomatopoeia
- The final letter breaks from real words into invented sound, acknowledging the joke of the exercise and giving the alphabet a playful, nonsensical exit.
- refrain
- The repeated title phrase bookends the list, turning an otherwise formless recitation into something with a musical frame.
Reading it
Read plainly, this is a nursery-rhyme novelty piece designed to teach the alphabet through absurd, kid-pleasing imagery — its 'meaning' is largely functional and comic rather than thematic. A slightly more generous reading notices that the behaviors King and Sendak string together (fussing, napping, quarreling, showing off) amount to a wry miniature of family life as seen by a child, with the alligators standing in for siblings or the child's own moods. Both readings agree the song isn't reaching for depth; its pleasure is in the alliterative wordplay and the manic build toward gibberish.
Context
The lyric originates from Maurice Sendak's 1975 book and was set to music by Carole King for the television special and later stage adaptation of Sendak's 'Nutshell Library' material, released as part of the Really Rosie song cycle; its appearance on this Ode Records compilation places a children's novelty song alongside King's adult pop catalogue, which is itself worth noting as an unusual pairing.
Listen for
- the way the melody speeds up as the alphabet accelerates toward Z
- how alliteration creates its own rhythmic pulse independent of the tune
- the shift in tone from chores to bad behavior across the middle letters
- the collapse into pure syllabic sound at the alphabet's end
- the returning title phrase functioning as the song's only real chorus
About Carole King
Carole King Klein is an American singer-songwriter and musician renowned for her extensive contributions to popular music. She wrote or co-wrote 118 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 during the latter half of the 20th century and 61 songs that reached the UK charts, establishing her as the most successful female songwriter on the UK singles charts from 1962 to 2005.
b. 1942 / United States
Full biography and catalogue