Drinking Song

A drinking song is a song sung while drinking alcohol. Most drinking songs are folk songs, and may be varied from person to person and region to region, in both the lyrics and in the music. Some groups that have a tradition of singing drinking songs include rugby players, Hash House Harriers, air force fighter pilots, and fraternities.

The spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" is used as a drinking song by members of the Hash House Harriers and rugby union players, with obscene gestures associated with the lyrics. This song is heightened to a drinking game by air force fighter pilots. The first person to fail to correctly make the gestures has to buy the next round of drinks.

Popular Canadian drinking songs include Stan Rogers' "Barrett's Privateers", Great Big Sea's "The Night Pat Murphy Died" and The Rankin Family's "The Mull River Shuffle". There are several French-Canadian drinking songs (Prends un verre de bière, mon minou, Chevaliers de la table ronde), some of which have even been recorded as singles by folk singers but the most well known is just chanting "Igloo! Igloo! Igloo!" (from "glou-glou", the sound someone makes while drinking) as someone chugs a beer or two just as "Drink! Drink! Drink! is chanted in English-speaking cultures.

In Germany, drinking songs are called Trinklieder. In Sweden, where they are called Dryckesvisor, traditions are upheld to an unusual degree in modern European context. There are drinking songs associated with Christmas, Midsummer, and other celebrations sometimes unique to Sweden. One commonly sung is "Helan går". Although singing songs from Fredmans Epistlar is less usual, Carl Michael Bellman's influence on the Swedish customary preoccupation with the drinking song is considerable. Drinking songs are an integral part of Finnish student culture, in no small part because of Swedish influence on sitsit. Local songs can be either in Finnish or in Swedish, and either played straight or self-subverting, by e.g. lapsing into Finnish in a Swedish song, or having a song consist entirely of the word Now! followed by drinking. In Spain, Asturias, patria querida (the anthem of Asturias) is usually depicted as a drinking song.