Bleeding Gums Murphy Print

“The Blues ain't about feeling better; it's about making other people feel worse.” -Bleeding Gums Murphy to Lisa "Bleeding Gums" or "Oscar Gums" Murphy Hibbert (died April 30, 1995), was the idol and role model of Lisa Simpson. He first appeared in the sixth episode of Season 1, "Moaning Lisa”. Bleeding Gums learned his musical skills at the feet of Blind Willie Witherspoon. Willie wanted to give Bleeding Gums his saxophone, only to be finally told that it wasn't a saxophone and actually an umbrella, meaning that Willie had actually been playing an umbrella for some thirty years. Bleeding Gums explained to Willie that no one informed him of the mistake because "we all thought it was funny”. Bleeding Gums recorded only one album, titled Sax on the Beach, which was extremely lucrative for him. However, he soon went broke after spending too much of his money on several Fabergé eggs a day. He revealed that he had once made a guest appearance on The Cosby Show in 1986 as the Huxtable children's grandfather, as well as appearing on Steve Allen's Tonight Show. Murphy makes his first appearance playing his saxophone on a bridge in the middle of the night. This is a reference to Sonny Rollins, the great saxophonist, who famously retired from public and was not seen for three years, until a journalist discovered him playing the saxophone alone on the Williamsburg Bridge. Bleeding Gums was a mentor to Lisa Simpson until his early death. He played and vocalized a song written by Lisa. It pleased Lisa to see the performance of her own jazz song in the bar "The Jazz Hole", but not everyone in the family was happy with lyrics, as they criticized several of them (in particular, Homer was shocked and incensed by Lisa's claim that he belonged at a zoo). Bleeding Gums once sang a twenty six minute version of the American National anthem "The Star Spangled Banner" at the Springfield Isotopes game. He serves as one of the three judges for a talent show once, giving Bart a 10 for his impersonation of Principal Skinner. He also appears joining in with the song "Sending Our Love Down the Well" after Bart pretends that he fell into a well. Source: Simpsons Wiki "'Round Springfield" is the 22nd episode of The Simpsons' sixth season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on April 30, 1995. In the episode, Bart is hospitalized after eating a piece of jagged metal in his Krusty-O's cereal and sues Krusty the Clown. While visiting Bart, Lisa discovers her old mentor, jazz musician Bleeding Gums Murphy, is also in the hospital. When he dies suddenly, she resolves to honor his memory. Steve Allen (as himself) and Ron Taylor (as Bleeding Gums Murphy) guest star, each in their second appearance on the show. Dan Higgins also returns as the writer and performer of all of Lisa and Bleeding Gums' saxophone solos. The episode was written by Joshua Sternin and Jeffrey Ventimilia — based on a story idea by Al Jean and Mike Reiss — and was the first episode directed by Steven Dean Moore. Jean and Reiss, who were previously the series' showrunners, returned to produce this episode (as well as "A Star Is Burns") to ease the workload of the show's regular staff. They worked on it alongside the staff of The Critic, the series they had left The Simpsons to create. The episode marks the series' first time that a recurring character was killed off, something the staff had considered for a while. The episode features numerous cultural references, including Carole King's song "Jazzman", the actor James Earl Jones and the Kimba the White Lion/The Lion King controversy. The episode also features the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", used by Groundskeeper Willie to describe the French. The phrase has since entered the public lexicon. It has been used and referenced by journalists and academics, and it appears in two Oxford quotation dictionaries. Source: Wikipedia