The association of wine, women, and song is an ancient one, and carries cultural baggage too multitudinous to unpack in a single blog (or year of blogs). The tradition in comedy of singing among men who have lubricated their windpipes sufficiently to break down discretion is also a bit much to consider in one blog, but one comic convention frequently expressed on bygone postcards is the association of certain songs with high (and plentiful) spirits.
A lovestruck kid wrote a poem for his girlfriend Rosalie and teamed up with a composer to turn it into a song. “You’re the Flower of My Heart, Sweet Rosalie”, bombed entirely in 1903. The two men saw a poster about the tour of singer Adelina Patti, tweaked the lyrics, and saw it picked up by several of the hottest male quartets in the recording industry. Boston politician John Fitzgerald picked it as a theme song, and it was sung at all manner of campaign stops, which were known for a certain amount of imbibing. The first appearance of it as an anthem sung by drunks is attributed to a Charlie Chaplin movie of 1922; and from then on, the honors of singing it on records were split between comedians and heartthrob tenors.
See, Adeline is a song of longing for a lost love, and, as Thomas Edison learned when trying to sell his early naughty records to the new cylinder saloons, what the drinking public likes to sing as the night rolls on are sad songs, not raucous humor. We could go into the whole tradition of, oh, Melancholy Baby, Piano Man, My Gal Sal, and half the history of country music, but we have other stuff to consider.
Earlier in the evening, social drinkers can reflect that SOME of their pals aren’t dead yet. Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here is or is not a song dating to 1917. This sheet music, attributed to the same lyricist who gave us “It’s Three O’clock in the Morning”, seems to be little more than a recognition that people had been singing these lyrics to a tune from Pirates of Penzance (“Come, friends, who plough the sea”) since at least the 1890s, when observers noted its popularity among amateur saloon singers.
The connection between people who sing over a sudsy mug is just one connection between singers in saloons and the barbershop quartet. The quartets, among the first pop groups available for your phonograph, helped make Sweet Adeline a hit, and were instrumental (sorry) in making any group of four think harmonizing was easy. One of the popular songs from the “absent friends” tradition, That Old Gang of Mine, in fact mourns the days when they sang together.
Any song will do for impromptu saloon singing, of course. “Mother Machree” or other songs of that ilk will do over Guinness, a solid college fight song will draw a crowd of people to join in, and I have even heard tell of a bar which used to really rock out on “Onward Christian Soldiers” (a good deal of foot-stomping was involved, I am told. This always helps.)
If you want a song that rivals Sweet Adeline as a boozy ballad, though, always fall back on “How Dry I Am”. The melody is simple and the lyrics, though everyone has their own personal favorite parody, will not confuse the pixilated. (Barring those people who grew up singing it as “How Dry Am I”.) This dates back to 1919, when it started off ”The Near Future”, a song by Irving Berlin about impending Prohibition.
It is suggested, though, that he decided to start his song with a traditional barroom tune, as the words can be found in nineteenth century sources, and the melody goes back to a theme by Beethoven. Unless it starts with a pop song of the eighteenth century. The similarity to an 1855 hymn called “Oh Happy Day” is apparently coincidental. Its popularity as a theme for saloons is attributed to Warner Brothers, which used it in movies and especially cartoons so any mention of actual drinking could be avoided. (An archive in Illinois, though, has sheet music from the silent movie era, suggesting it was already used by theater organists to indicate intoxication.)
Here. We’ve covered this before. This Bavarian postcard of 1906 or thereabouts simply quotes a German drinking song. Nobody seems to know or care when it first appeared, and though I can find videos of old men singing it in bars, no one will give me a translation. I gave up translating foreign songs after my record-breaking version of “The March of the Kings” (one person who heard it was so dismayed he dropped his 78 of “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me”.) But as far as I can determine, the lyrics are something like “drink and tinkle and drink and tinkle and drink and tinkle again.” Makes “How Dry I Am” sound like the Hallelujah Chorus.
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