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The Cat in the Hat Songbook
How long can you stare at another kid from three inches away and not laugh?
In "The No Laugh Race," 1 of 19 songs in "The Cat in the Hat Songbook," you get to find out—and the kid who laughs last is the winner. Each song has full piano score by Eugene Poddany, and many have simple guitar chords, too.
This classically wacky songbook contains 19 Seuss-songs for the beginning singer. There are lively songs like "Plinker Plunker" and "The No Laugh Race," bedtime songs like "Lullaby for Mr. Benjamin B. Bickelbaum," and just plain silly songs like "Cry a Pint." With a sturdy binding that opens flat for easy use, and simple piano and guitar arrangements, The Cat in the Hat Songbook is truly something to sing about!
Whether waltzy, marchish, andante doloroso, or "Ad lib rubato tempo to simulate sneeze," these songs are bound to get the whole family caterwauling—which, as the first song affirms, is "good for tongues, and necks and knees, of people, bees, and chimpanzees." Some of the lyrics are even a teensy bit educational, amid the usual madness: "I Can Figure Figures" includes such unusual sums as "One plus one minus one is none. None plus none minus none is none." It all adds up to a lot of musical fun.
Dr. Seuss and his unique combination of hilarious stories, zany pictures and riotous rhymes, have been delighting young children and helping them learn to read for over fifty years. Creator of the wonderfully anarchic 'Cat in the Hat' (1957), and ranked among the world's top children's authors, Dr. Seuss is a global best-seller, with nearly half a billion books sold worldwide.
Edition MSRP: US $16⁹⁵ (ISBN 0-394-81695-1)
Printed in the United States of America
In "The No Laugh Race," 1 of 19 songs in "The Cat in the Hat Songbook," you get to find out—and the kid who laughs last is the winner. Each song has full piano score by Eugene Poddany, and many have simple guitar chords, too.
This classically wacky songbook contains 19 Seuss-songs for the beginning singer. There are lively songs like "Plinker Plunker" and "The No Laugh Race," bedtime songs like "Lullaby for Mr. Benjamin B. Bickelbaum," and just plain silly songs like "Cry a Pint." With a sturdy binding that opens flat for easy use, and simple piano and guitar arrangements, The Cat in the Hat Songbook is truly something to sing about!
Whether waltzy, marchish, andante doloroso, or "Ad lib rubato tempo to simulate sneeze," these songs are bound to get the whole family caterwauling—which, as the first song affirms, is "good for tongues, and necks and knees, of people, bees, and chimpanzees." Some of the lyrics are even a teensy bit educational, amid the usual madness: "I Can Figure Figures" includes such unusual sums as "One plus one minus one is none. None plus none minus none is none." It all adds up to a lot of musical fun.
Dr. Seuss and his unique combination of hilarious stories, zany pictures and riotous rhymes, have been delighting young children and helping them learn to read for over fifty years. Creator of the wonderfully anarchic 'Cat in the Hat' (1957), and ranked among the world's top children's authors, Dr. Seuss is a global best-seller, with nearly half a billion books sold worldwide.
Edition MSRP: US $16⁹⁵ (ISBN 0-394-81695-1)
Printed in the United States of America
72 pages, Hardcover
First published August 12, 1967
10 people are currently reading
466 people want to read
About the author
Dr. Seuss
1,083 books18.4k followersAlso wrote as Theodore Seuss Geisel, see https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born 2 March 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He graduated Dartmouth College in 1925, and proceeded on to Oxford University with the intent of acquiring a doctorate in literature. At Oxford he met Helen Palmer, who he wed in 1927. He returned from Europe in 1927, and began working for a magazine called Judge, the leading humor magazine in America at the time, submitting both cartoons and humorous articles for them. Additionally, he was submitting cartoons to Life, Vanity Fair and Liberty. In some of his works, he'd made reference to an insecticide called Flit. These references gained notice, and led to a contract to draw comic ads for Flit. This association lasted 17 years, gained him national exposure, and coined the catchphrase "Quick, Henry, the Flit!"
In 1936 on the way to a vacation in Europe, listening to the rhythm of the ship's engines, he came up with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was then promptly rejected by the first 43 publishers he showed it to. Eventually in 1937 a friend published the book for him, and it went on to at least moderate success.
During World War II, Geisel joined the army and was sent to Hollywood. Captain Geisel would write for Frank Capra's Signal Corps Unit (for which he won the Legion of Merit) and do documentaries (he won Oscar's for Hitler Lives and Design for Death). He also created a cartoon called Gerald McBoing-Boing which also won him an Oscar.
In May of 1954, Life published a report concerning illiteracy among school children. The report said, among other things, that children were having trouble to read because their books were boring. This inspired Geisel's publisher, and prompted him to send Geisel a list of 400 words he felt were important, asked him to cut the list to 250 words (the publishers idea of how many words at one time a first grader could absorb), and write a book. Nine months later, Geisel, using 220 of the words given to him published The Cat in the Hat , which went on to instant success.
In 1960 Bennett Cerf bet Geisel $50 that he couldn't write an entire book using only fifty words. The result was Green Eggs and Ham . Cerf never paid the $50 from the bet.
Helen Palmer Geisel died in 1967. Theodor Geisel married Audrey Stone Diamond in 1968. Theodor Seuss Geisel died 24 September 1991.
Also worked under the pen name: Theo Le Sieg
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born 2 March 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He graduated Dartmouth College in 1925, and proceeded on to Oxford University with the intent of acquiring a doctorate in literature. At Oxford he met Helen Palmer, who he wed in 1927. He returned from Europe in 1927, and began working for a magazine called Judge, the leading humor magazine in America at the time, submitting both cartoons and humorous articles for them. Additionally, he was submitting cartoons to Life, Vanity Fair and Liberty. In some of his works, he'd made reference to an insecticide called Flit. These references gained notice, and led to a contract to draw comic ads for Flit. This association lasted 17 years, gained him national exposure, and coined the catchphrase "Quick, Henry, the Flit!"
In 1936 on the way to a vacation in Europe, listening to the rhythm of the ship's engines, he came up with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was then promptly rejected by the first 43 publishers he showed it to. Eventually in 1937 a friend published the book for him, and it went on to at least moderate success.
During World War II, Geisel joined the army and was sent to Hollywood. Captain Geisel would write for Frank Capra's Signal Corps Unit (for which he won the Legion of Merit) and do documentaries (he won Oscar's for Hitler Lives and Design for Death). He also created a cartoon called Gerald McBoing-Boing which also won him an Oscar.
In May of 1954, Life published a report concerning illiteracy among school children. The report said, among other things, that children were having trouble to read because their books were boring. This inspired Geisel's publisher, and prompted him to send Geisel a list of 400 words he felt were important, asked him to cut the list to 250 words (the publishers idea of how many words at one time a first grader could absorb), and write a book. Nine months later, Geisel, using 220 of the words given to him published The Cat in the Hat , which went on to instant success.
In 1960 Bennett Cerf bet Geisel $50 that he couldn't write an entire book using only fifty words. The result was Green Eggs and Ham . Cerf never paid the $50 from the bet.
Helen Palmer Geisel died in 1967. Theodor Geisel married Audrey Stone Diamond in 1968. Theodor Seuss Geisel died 24 September 1991.
Also worked under the pen name: Theo Le Sieg
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 1, 2018
A 1967 collection of songs written by Dr. Seuss are masterfully arranged by composer Eugene Poddany, who gets an awfully small billing for this book considering the quality of the music, especially the harmonies (yes, I am a musician).
All the songs are brilliant. This book also marks the completion of a quest - to read everything Dr. Seuss ever wrote that still exists in print.
All the songs are brilliant. This book also marks the completion of a quest - to read everything Dr. Seuss ever wrote that still exists in print.
March 22, 2015
I do not own a piano, and I am not known to read music in a way that makes me capable of singing (that is, I can read music to play instruments). I checked this out purely because of my efforts to read all Seuss books. And so I read it. It's cute. Might be fun for a kid who does play the piano. Not an easy book to find, tho.
July 27, 2020
Great book! Such a cool idea
January 17, 2026
I'm reading through all of Dr. Seuss's books chronologically, and this is his thirty-first one. It was published, I believe, on January 1, 1967, which was less than a month after Seuss's major endeavor of 1966, the television film of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which premiered on December 18. This is a masterful and now classic film, and although Seuss had worked in animation before, during the war and with Gerald McBoing Boing for instance, it marked his first collaboration with the animation legend Chuck Jones. Because of their synergy and the subject matter of The Grinch itself, I think it marks the high point for Seuss's cinematic output, and it's never been topped since his death.
Jones, therefore, is seen as Seuss's chief collaborator at this time, but this songbook points to another teammate who Seuss very well may have had a closer working relationship with. That's the songwriter Eugene Poddany, who wrote the songs for The Grinch. All the lyrics were by Seuss—including classic lines like "You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile"—which means that he and Poddany must have worked closely together, and enjoyed it enough they decided to create a songbook together. Indeed, considering the importance of the music to this book, I'm surprised it's not billed as a co-authorial work. The Seuss name sells, I guess, so Poddany is just noted at the bottom of the cover.
The first thing to note is that this book was a failure. It did not sell. I seem to recall that it was one of the two books by Seuss that went out of print during his lifetime, the other being the long forgotten Seven Lady Godivas. So my question in reading it is why that was, and it didn't seem very hard to figure out. The subtitle reads "19 Seuss-Songs for Beginning Singers," but it's certainly not for beginning pianists. In the first place, in selling a songbook you're limiting yourself to families with a piano (or guitar, as the chords are provided as well), which is still a sizeable market but much smaller than that for regular picture books, which require no musical ability. And then this book doesn't just require a pianist, but a reasonably good one. These songs were by and large rather difficult for me to play. It's not Liszt or Bach, but there are fairly complex rhythms and counterpoints, large chords, tons of accidentals, shifting time signatures, lots of written instructions about dynamics and original sounds ("hit the keyboard with the palms of your open hands"), and more fermatas and especially grace notes/glissandos than you can shake a stick at. I got completely lost on one song that's a round—how do you notate that?—and there's a game song where children are supposed to stand nose to nose and sing without laughing, the problem being that they'd have to memorize the song first. So those kinds of issues might limit the audience even more, and may have affected people's long-term engagement with the book, and hence it's word of mouth as well. That could just be me—I'm not seeing any other reviews here saying the songs are hard—but that's definitely my take on it. I don't really want to have to practice to play a silly song for kids.
That may be the downside of the music, but the upside is how inventive it is. And that goes along with Seuss's lyrics as well. There are a lot of nonsense words and onomatopoeia, even going so far as an entire song imitating a sneeze and another imitating a yawn. The music matches the words' inventiveness—I guess that makes it intermediate to difficult, but when you do play it right it's a lot of fun. And at its heart the book's like a collection of Seuss poetry: unconnected little bursts of rhyming verse on a really wide range of subjects, including some for specific uses like lullabies and a birthday song, but he excels at the nonsense but narrative (e.g. not a sneeze) songs, like how "My Uncle Terwilliger Waltzes with Bears" and "My Uncle Terwilliger Likes to Pat" (camels and frogs and things). To be clear, this is not his best work, and none of it rises to the level of the Grinch songs, but it's really interesting to see him working in a different format.
What about the book visually, as a book? It's very well designed. Seuss's illustrations are nothing novel, his typical ink-wash characters, including some recurring ones besides the Cat in the Hat. But the design is really fun and inventive, as Seuss, Poddany, and surely a whole team at Random House made sure that the illustrations worked around the score perfectly, with everything always ending at the end of the page, and no dead white space. In a few cases you get something really inventive, like the musical staff being printed at a jaunty angle, or a series of single measures coupled with a drawing going down the page. It's not really a picture book per se, but it has all the fun visual elements you'd expect from Dr. Seuss.
This is far from Seuss's best work, but it's highly inventive and in the right hands can be lots of fun. It's fun to see him still pushing for new formats and media, like songs and TV, especially since we're about to hit a two-year dry spell that were the most tumultuous of his life.
My complete series of reviews of all sixty-three Dr. Seuss books in order—a list I believe only exists here—plus three of his many books published posthumously, is here. And here specifically are my reviews of his previous book, Come Over to My House , and his next one, The Eye Book . Or you can see my reviews starting from the beginning here!
Jones, therefore, is seen as Seuss's chief collaborator at this time, but this songbook points to another teammate who Seuss very well may have had a closer working relationship with. That's the songwriter Eugene Poddany, who wrote the songs for The Grinch. All the lyrics were by Seuss—including classic lines like "You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile"—which means that he and Poddany must have worked closely together, and enjoyed it enough they decided to create a songbook together. Indeed, considering the importance of the music to this book, I'm surprised it's not billed as a co-authorial work. The Seuss name sells, I guess, so Poddany is just noted at the bottom of the cover.
The first thing to note is that this book was a failure. It did not sell. I seem to recall that it was one of the two books by Seuss that went out of print during his lifetime, the other being the long forgotten Seven Lady Godivas. So my question in reading it is why that was, and it didn't seem very hard to figure out. The subtitle reads "19 Seuss-Songs for Beginning Singers," but it's certainly not for beginning pianists. In the first place, in selling a songbook you're limiting yourself to families with a piano (or guitar, as the chords are provided as well), which is still a sizeable market but much smaller than that for regular picture books, which require no musical ability. And then this book doesn't just require a pianist, but a reasonably good one. These songs were by and large rather difficult for me to play. It's not Liszt or Bach, but there are fairly complex rhythms and counterpoints, large chords, tons of accidentals, shifting time signatures, lots of written instructions about dynamics and original sounds ("hit the keyboard with the palms of your open hands"), and more fermatas and especially grace notes/glissandos than you can shake a stick at. I got completely lost on one song that's a round—how do you notate that?—and there's a game song where children are supposed to stand nose to nose and sing without laughing, the problem being that they'd have to memorize the song first. So those kinds of issues might limit the audience even more, and may have affected people's long-term engagement with the book, and hence it's word of mouth as well. That could just be me—I'm not seeing any other reviews here saying the songs are hard—but that's definitely my take on it. I don't really want to have to practice to play a silly song for kids.
That may be the downside of the music, but the upside is how inventive it is. And that goes along with Seuss's lyrics as well. There are a lot of nonsense words and onomatopoeia, even going so far as an entire song imitating a sneeze and another imitating a yawn. The music matches the words' inventiveness—I guess that makes it intermediate to difficult, but when you do play it right it's a lot of fun. And at its heart the book's like a collection of Seuss poetry: unconnected little bursts of rhyming verse on a really wide range of subjects, including some for specific uses like lullabies and a birthday song, but he excels at the nonsense but narrative (e.g. not a sneeze) songs, like how "My Uncle Terwilliger Waltzes with Bears" and "My Uncle Terwilliger Likes to Pat" (camels and frogs and things). To be clear, this is not his best work, and none of it rises to the level of the Grinch songs, but it's really interesting to see him working in a different format.
What about the book visually, as a book? It's very well designed. Seuss's illustrations are nothing novel, his typical ink-wash characters, including some recurring ones besides the Cat in the Hat. But the design is really fun and inventive, as Seuss, Poddany, and surely a whole team at Random House made sure that the illustrations worked around the score perfectly, with everything always ending at the end of the page, and no dead white space. In a few cases you get something really inventive, like the musical staff being printed at a jaunty angle, or a series of single measures coupled with a drawing going down the page. It's not really a picture book per se, but it has all the fun visual elements you'd expect from Dr. Seuss.
This is far from Seuss's best work, but it's highly inventive and in the right hands can be lots of fun. It's fun to see him still pushing for new formats and media, like songs and TV, especially since we're about to hit a two-year dry spell that were the most tumultuous of his life.
My complete series of reviews of all sixty-three Dr. Seuss books in order—a list I believe only exists here—plus three of his many books published posthumously, is here. And here specifically are my reviews of his previous book, Come Over to My House , and his next one, The Eye Book . Or you can see my reviews starting from the beginning here!
January 25, 2025
This songbook includes the lyrics and musical score for piano and guitar for 19 songs. There isn't a story involved but the songs are amusing and there are some illustrations.
This reader's favorite song was "Cry A Pint".
This reader's favorite song was "Cry A Pint".
March 9, 2017
Grade Level: Pre K-1st
Summary: This book is great for rhyming and could make the children giggle. Many songs to choose from and many written with wacky words throughout. This book would be great if there was an additional tape or way to have live music incorporated with the songs, this was the tune would be known and the songs could be sang to full effect.
Review: Some of these songs seem great and others were a lot less appealing to me. Some of the songs don't make much sense to me so I am not quite sure how they would transfer to the children. Either way I think this book is colorful and fun and could be a great addition to a classroom.
In Class Use: You could use songs such as "the yawn song" before they go down for a nap in a pre-k or daycare environment. You could also use them as a silly way to spend free time and create movement and dance into the classroom.
Summary: This book is great for rhyming and could make the children giggle. Many songs to choose from and many written with wacky words throughout. This book would be great if there was an additional tape or way to have live music incorporated with the songs, this was the tune would be known and the songs could be sang to full effect.
Review: Some of these songs seem great and others were a lot less appealing to me. Some of the songs don't make much sense to me so I am not quite sure how they would transfer to the children. Either way I think this book is colorful and fun and could be a great addition to a classroom.
In Class Use: You could use songs such as "the yawn song" before they go down for a nap in a pre-k or daycare environment. You could also use them as a silly way to spend free time and create movement and dance into the classroom.
March 13, 2017
1. No awards
2. 3-7 years
3. This book has many songs each represented in music notes. The songs have a variety of themes such as emotions, yawning, friendship, and math.
4. If you can play the piano, it'll be great to sing with the class using this book. The lyrics are catchy and entertaining.
5. Singing time
2. 3-7 years
3. This book has many songs each represented in music notes. The songs have a variety of themes such as emotions, yawning, friendship, and math.
4. If you can play the piano, it'll be great to sing with the class using this book. The lyrics are catchy and entertaining.
5. Singing time
March 3, 2013
Fantastic book for kids! So imaginative and creative. Easy read that children will find delightful!
Dr. Seuss is always brilliant! His stories and rhymes are fun and entertaining! Some of my all time favorites!! Such a great way to entertain children and get them interested in reading!
Dr. Seuss is always brilliant! His stories and rhymes are fun and entertaining! Some of my all time favorites!! Such a great way to entertain children and get them interested in reading!
March 12, 2013
An illustrated songbook with sheet music for piano and guitar. Songs are fun and nonsensical. The only thing I wish was included was a CD. For musicians, this would be a fun addition to a Seuss program.
June 3, 2010
My favorite book ever when I was a little kid singing all the songs in the book.
December 2, 2010
This book has great funny songs. You will be laughing out loud and so will your students !!!
December 15, 2010
I LIKED THIS BOOK
November 5, 2012
Sing along with Dr. Seuss.
December 30, 2012
I have an original blue version.
March 5, 2013
the in a hat
March 15, 2014
This is an awesome edition to any Dr. Seuss collection.
June 1, 2022
Lovely book for those who would like to learn singing and playing instruments.. not for me
January 7, 2014
It's Dr. Seuss! What more can you say? Inspirational, appropriate and fun for any age.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews