Is there somewhere a list of the songs that Ford was parodying in How Much For Just The Planet? Even though I'm a huge musical theatre nerd, I didn't get some of the references in the book and it always bugged me.
(And speaking of John M Ford: Personally I still regret that the Klingon culture that the franchise developed through TNG and subsequent shows differed so much from the one Ford created in The Final Reflection.)
It’s a puzzle that has confounded readers for years. There are some obvious ones like “Rawhide”, but a lot are still unidentified. Here’s a good attempt at it.