The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #5512   Message #4182579
Posted By: Lighter
27-Sep-23 - 03:48 PM
Thread Name: Origin: All for Me Grog
Subject: RE: Origin: All for Me Grog
It's very interesting to see how just part of the song, with later elaborations, survived in tradition for more than two hundred years.

A writer in the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 8, 1925), who learned songs and chanteys from blue-water sailors "in my boyhood," offered this:

"I have an old shoe with never a bit of sole,
It serves me alike in all weather;
It hasn't got a heel, and it hasn't got a toe,
And it hasn't got a bit of upper leather.

And it's all for my grog, my jolly, jolly grog,
It's all for my grog and tobacco.

"This song goes through the entire kit, from the hat with no brim or crown, to the socks with no cotton or wool or room for a hole, but it dwells lingeringly all through the recitation on the 'jolly, jolly grog.'"

Oxford has "tin" (money) from 1836. It used to be common in the U.S. as well (as in "The Camptown Races"), but I'd say it was out of frequent usage by 1900.