Timothy

"Timothy" is a pop rock song recorded by The Buoys as a single in 1970. The song describes a mine cave-in and aftermath, with the implication the two survivors cannibalized their companion, the eponymous Timothy. Written by Rupert Holmes, who also performed piano on the song, "Timothy" was conceived from the band being forced to promote their first single without the aid of their label, Scepter Records. Holmes' solution was to have the song generate attention by depicting a controversial subject. Despite initial efforts from radio stations to ban the song, "Timothy" proved to be a success for the Buoys. It reached the U.S. Billboard Top 40 chart on April 17, 1971, where it remained on the chart for eight weeks and peaked at #17. On the U.S. Cash Box Top 100, it spent two weeks at #13. In Canada, the song reached #9. "Timothy" became the Buoys' best known song and their only song to chart on Billboard. Origin According to his own account, Rupert Holmes and a colleague had discovered the Buoys and persuaded Scepter Records to sign them to a one-single contract. Since the deal did not call for the label to promote the single, the band would have to find some other way to get themselves and their song known. Holmes suggested a novel solution to this problem: to purposefully record a song likely to be banned, thus generating publicity for the Buoys under the time-honored axiom that "there's no such thing as bad publicity". Inspiration Holmes has cited the 1947 country song "Sixteen Tons" (about the hard life of a coal miner) and the 1959 film adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly Last Summer (which also contains allusions to cannibalism) as inspirations for "Timothy." He decided to combine the themes of these two works into a ballad of three miners — Timothy, Joe, and the singer — trapped by a cave-in, sung in the first person from the perspective of one of the miners. By the time they're rescued, only two of them survive. Although the fate of the missing man, Timothy, is never explicitly revealed, it is strongly implied by the fact that the two survivors, once hungry and with no access to food, and only enough water for two people, show no sign of hunger when they're rescued.