Drinking Songs
Drinking songs that consist of numerous verses describing the humorous and ribald invigorating effects of some food or medicine form almost a small genre in themselves. Lydia and her "medicinal compound" are memorialized in the folk song "The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham," also known as "Lily the Pink". A sanitized version of Lily the Pink was a number one hit for The Scaffold in the United Kingdom in 1968/69. This song was further successfully adapted into French in 1969 by Richard Anthony, describing humorously the devastating effects of a so-called "panacée" (universal medicine). It should not pass without mention that the reason a humble women's tonic was the subject of such and sundry ribald drinking ballads and an increasing success in the twenties and early thirties was its availability, as a 40-proof patent eye-opener, during Prohibition. As folk songs, they have no definitive versions.
Read more about this topic: Lydia Pinkham
Famous quotes containing the words drinking and/or songs:
“Maria. He’s drunk nightly in your company.
Sir Toby Belch. With drinking healths to my niece. I’ll drink to her as long as there is a passage in my throat, and drink in Illyria.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society. He is against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world.... Dylan’s songs accept the world as it is.”
—Ewan MacColl (1915–1989)