Somewhere along the line  at a wedding, at a child’s birthday party, in third-grade music class  everybody has done the hokey pokey. Admit it: you sang the silly song, you did the silly dance.

You know the one:

You put your right hand in,

You put your right hand out,

You put your right hand in,

And you shake it all about.

You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around.

That’s what it’s all about.

Popular as the song is, its authorship has long been in dispute, with the credit usually going to Larry LaPrise, who as part of a musical group, the Ram Trio, is said to have created it in Sun Valley, Idaho, as a novelty number to entertain vacationing skiers. The trio, whose other members were Charles Peter Macak and Tafft Baker, recorded the song, “The Hokey Pokey,” in the late 1940s.

There are many reasons to question this version of the song’s provenance, however. Among them is that a very similar song, “The Hokey Pokey Dance,” was copyrighted a few years earlier, in 1944, by a club musician from Scranton, Pa., named Robert Degen. Mr. Degen  who claimed for decades that Mr. LaPrise had stolen his song  died in Lexington, Ky., on Nov. 23, his 104th birthday. (Mr. LaPrise died in 1996, and the two men never met.)