In 1962, the song began simply as "The Red Baron"; songwriter
Dick Holler patterned it after the history-minded hits of
Johnny Horton (such as "
Sink the Bismark" and "
The Battle of New Orleans"), and told of the real-life air battles against the
Red Baron. As Holler said later, "We went down to
Cosimo’s in
New Orleans and recorded it, and spent all day putting in airplane sounds and machine gun bullets and took it around to every major label. Nobody wanted to put it out, so it sat on the shelf for three years." Four years later, producer
Phil Gernhard saw that the
comic strip Peanuts, by
Charles Schulz, was featuring a recurring storyline of
Snoopy imagining himself in the role of a
World War I airman (and his doghouse a
Sopwith Camel fighter plane), fighting the Red Baron. Gernhard wrote two new verses to the song, adding the character of Snoopy, and gave it to
The Royal Guardsmen to sing. The record was released approximately one year after the first comic strip featuring Snoopy fighting the Red Baron appeared on Sunday October 10, 1965. Schulz and
United Features Syndicate sued the Royal Guardsmen for using the name Snoopy without permission or an advertising license. (The Guardsmen, meanwhile, hedged their bets by recording an alternative version of the song, called "Squeaky vs. the Black Knight"; some copies of this version were issued by Laurie Records in Canada.) UFS won the suit, on the condition that all publishing revenues from the song would go to them. Schulz did allow the group to write more Snoopy songs. The song begins with a background commentary in faux German: "Achtung! Jetzt wir singen zusammen die Geschichte über den Schweinköpfigen Hund und den lieben Red Baron," which is a purposeful mistranslation of the English: "Attention! We will now sing together the story of that pig-headed dog (Snoopy) and the beloved Red Baron" and features the sound of a German sergeant counting off in ones ("eins, zwei, drei, vier", after the first verse), and an American sergeant counting off in fours (after the second verse); a fighter plane; machine guns; and a plane in a tailspin (at the end of the last verse). From 1:46 to 1:54 the song quotes a variant of the instrumental chords from
The McCoys' version of "
Hang On Sloopy". On the original recording of "Snoopy", the lyrics "Hang on Snoopy, Snoopy hang on" were sung at this point. This tactic led to some initial speculation that the Guardsmen were the McCoys under a different name. Prior to its release, these lyrics were removed to prevent copyright issues. The song's chorus refers to "the bloody Red Baron". As "bloody" is considered a mild expletive in Australia, and some other English-speaking countries, the word was censored by being "bleeped" out for radio and TV airplay in Australia during the 1960s and early 1970s. ==Other releases and covers==