Preserving Tom Lehrer's gift to the public domain
In 2020, Tom Lehrer did something extraordinary and characteristically generous: he permanently and irrevocably released all of his songs into the public domain. He put them up at tomlehrersongs.com — the lyrics, the sheet music, the recordings — for anyone to enjoy, perform, remix, and share, forever.
But alongside that gift, the original site carried this notice:
THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON'T WAIT TOO LONG.
On July 26, 2025, Tom Lehrer passed away at the age of 97 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With his passing, the future of the original website became uncertain. The songs are in the public domain, but a website needs someone to keep the lights on.
This site — tomlehrersongs.org — is a complete, static mirror of the original tomlehrersongs.com. Every song page, every lyric sheet, every PDF of sheet music, every MP3 recording, and every album download that was available on the original site has been preserved here.
The intent is simple: to make sure that Tom Lehrer's generous gift to the world remains accessible for as long as possible. The songs belong to everyone now. The least we can do is keep them where people can find them.
The complete source code for this mirror — including the scraping tool
and all site content — is available on GitHub. If you'd like to host your own
mirror, clone the repo and deploy the site/ directory to any static
hosting service. The more mirrors, the better.
Note: This mirror is not affiliated with Tom Lehrer, the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, or the original tomlehrersongs.com. All song content was released into the public domain by Tom Lehrer himself in 2020. This mirror was created in the spirit of preservation and gratitude.
If the original site is still online, please visit tomlehrersongs.com first — it's the real thing.