Show Me the Way to Go Home

"Show Me the Way to Go Home" is a popular song written in 1925 by the pseudonymous "Irving King" (the English songwriting team James Campbell and Reginald Connelly). The song is said to have been written on a train journey from London by Campbell and Connelly. They were tired from the traveling and had a few alcoholic drinks during the journey, hence the lyrics. The song is in common use in England, Ireland, and North America.

Publication

The music and lyrics were written in 1925 by Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly. They self-published the sheet music and it became their first big success, selling 2 million copies and providing the financial basis of their publishing firm, Campbell, Connelly & Co.^[1] Campbell and Connelly published the sheet music and recorded the song under the pseudonym "Irving King".^[2]

The song was recorded by several artists in the 1920s, including radio personalities The Happiness Boys,^[2] Vincent Lopez and his Orchestra,^[2] and the California Ramblers.^[3] Throughout the twentieth into the twenty-first century it has been recorded by numerous artists.

Popular culture

Literature

• Referenced several times in Norman Mailer's 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead.
• George Orwell references the song in his 1934 novel Burmese Days.
• Brick, a main character of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, sings this song toward the end while drinking liquor, leaving out the line "And it's gone right to my head" and the last two lines due to dialogue between other characters.

Film

• Famously used in the popular 1975 thriller film Jaws, the song was sung by the three principal characters of Brody (Roy Scheider), Quint (Robert Shaw), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss).
• It is sung by an old man in the jail in A River Runs Through It when Paul is picked up by his brother.
• In the Woody Allen film Cassandra's Dream, Terry (Colin Farrell) and Ian (Ewan McGregor) sing this song on the maiden voyage of their boat.
• In the opening scene of Piranha 3D (2010), Richard Dreyfuss (reprising/spoofing his character of Matt Hooper from Jaws) listens to this song as well as singing along.
• In a stolen car scene from Eat My Dust! (1976) starring Ron Howard.

Television

• In the premiere episode of the World War II TV show Combat!, "Forgotten Front", Albert Paulsen plays a captured German soldier who shows his love for American music by singing this song.
• In an episode of Family Guy ("A Fish out of Water"), where Peter and his friends are on his boat hunting a feared fish, they recreate the scene from Jaws and sing this song as they become weary.
• The character Harry Hewitt sings a portion of this song in a drunken stupor in an early episode of Coronation Street, transmitted in early 1961.
• Davy Jones sings this during the "Listen To The Band/Chaos" segment of The Monkees TV special "33 and a 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee" (NBC, 1968.)
• In an episode of Red Dwarf ("Thanks for the Memory"), the main characters get drunk after finding a planet with a breathable atmosphere, afterwards singing the song while piloting a shuttle back to the ship, altering the words "And it's gone right to my head" with "To celebrate Rimmer's death" (BBC2, 1988.)
• In the Babylon 5 episode "Meditations on the Abyss", Garibaldi is singing this to himself while he is very drunk.
• In the English dub version of Ghost Stories, one of the main characters uses this song as a chant to trap a ghost.

Music

• Frank Crumit recorded a version of the song in 1926.^[4]
• Jefferson Starship covered the song live during shows of their Acoustic Explorer / Acoustic Shuttlecraft incarnation in 1996–1998.
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer included their version of the song on their 1977 album Works Volume II.
• Shai Hulud sings the song as a group as the hidden track on their album Hearts Once Nourished with Hope and Compassion.

References