Beer Ballads

When Congress done scuttled our schooners Whose cargo was oil for our pipes, It made us a nation of crooners, Sans harmony, "minors," or ''swipes." But now that once more we are getting Real brew, you will hear once again Real songs that were meant for quartetting By real and non-crooning hemen. --Ring Lardner Not alone is Funnyman Lardner in believing that close harmony suffered more than drinking under Prohibition. His verses were written for a new book of songs. Bottoms Up! compiled by Clifford Leach.* How, asks Editor Leach, can a quartet whose voices are fuzzy, ears uncertain from bibbing hard liquor, render: Once I was happy, but now I'm forlorn. Like an old coat that is tattered and torn, I'm left in this world to fret and to mourn, Betrayed by a maid in her teens. Now this girl that I loved she was handsome and swell, And I tried all I knew her to please; But I never could please her one-quarter so well As the man on the flying trapeze. . . . "Clifford Leach" is the pseudonym of an inveterate oldtime Princeton song-leader who is afraid, because of his work among schoolboys, to be publicly identified with a drinking anthology. For Bottoms Ip! he has raked about in old songbags, fished up ballads once lustily trolled in college dormitories, saloons and stag parties all over the U. S. Included are contributions from such famed collectors of U. S. folk songs as Carl Sandburg, Sigmund Spaeth. Too short to be exhaustive. Bottoms Up! nevertheless contains, besides sundry U. S. stein songs, famed drinking songs of Europe and three classics of the A. E. F. Editor Leach knows that not all drinking songs are about drinking. Bottoms Up! is rich in burlesques of the "Frankie and Johnnie" type, includes the almost inaccessible "Lydia Pinkham," a favorite of gusty Author Henry Louis Mencken. Also included is the full text of Playwright Brian Hooker's famed "Don't Swat Your Mother with the Rocker": Don't swat yer mother, boys, just 'cause she's old! Don't mop the floor with her face. Think how her lore is a treasure of gold. Shining through shame and disgrace. Don't put the rocking chair next to her eye; Don't bounce the lamp off her bean! Angels are watching you up in the sky; Don't swat yer mother; it's mean! . Connoisseurs who consider some of their favorites unprintable will find by consulting Bottoms Up! that they are not mistaken. Strictly stag songs are given in diluted form, but quartettists are free to amend the text, bellow their own versions of "Christofo Colombo" and ''Samuel Hall."

*Published by Paull-Pioneer Music Corp. Includes chords for guitar, ukulele and tenor-banjo. 35-c-.

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