The Crazy Otto Medley
song
"The Crazy Otto Medley" is a ragtime medley, originally arranged and recorded by the German comic performer Fritz Schulz-Reichel under the pseudonym of "Der schräge Otto" aka "Crazy Otto". The best-known version is a 1955 recording made by pianist Johnny Maddox.
The opening tune in the medley is "Ivory Rag" by Lou Busch and Jack Elliott. The closing song is "Play a Simple Melody" by Irving Berlin. The songs sandwiched in between these two are pop songs from Germany. The first of them is "In der Nacht ist der Mensch nicht gern alleine" by Franz Grothe. The second is "Das machen nur die Beine von Dolores" by Michael Jary. The third is "Was macht der alte Seemann" (Heino Gaze & Günther Schwenn).
The Maddox recording of the Crazy Otto Medley entered the Billboard charts on February 5, 1955, and spent 20 weeks, peaking at #2 for seven weeks. It also became the first million-selling ragtime record in the United States since Del Wood's "Down Yonder" in 1951, and eventually sold in excess of two million copies.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Crazy Otto Medley” is song. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Crazy, Otto and Medley, not as a finished interpretation.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7727981. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1955 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Crazy Otto Medley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.