Disentanglement to above: I'm the one who traced "Throw a Nickel on the Drum." Gus Meade traced "Glory to the Lamb" to its apparent origin.

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How "Throw a Nickel on the Drum and you'll be saved" (which apparently was cried out by Salvation Army lads and lassies as they worked the streets) became "Throw a nickel on the drum, save another drunken bum" ... ensues.

Again the key is found in the 1928 version in A Collection of Sea Songs and Ditties of from the Stores of Dave E. Jones at http://www.folklore.ms/html/books_and_MSS/1920s/1928ca_a_collection_of_sea_songs_and_ditties__dave_e_jones_(HC)/index.htm (see the first of this series of four posts).

That version still retained the "Monday I am happy, Tuesday full of joy" gospel verse. But it appeared in a collection of raffish songs, some of them bawdy, plainly meant for use by drinkers, college students, and other lost souls.

I have been unable to trace any other transition version, and I don't know the author of the parody lyrics, but by the late 1940s, as Dick Greenhaus remembers in a message in another thread on this topic, goodtime singers of all stripes were singing the parody in essentially its modern version.

The first of these to reach print (that I have yet found) appeared in Marion Kingston, A Folk Song Chapbook, Beloit Poetry Journal Vol 6, No. 2, Chapbook No. 4, Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin, 1955. It has a first and third verses I've never seen elsewhere. Thus it may be pretty close to the original parody.

GUTTER SONG

Collected from the Colorado Mountain Club Juniors.

As I was walking down the street, as drunk as I could be,
I thought I spied a lamp-post a-coming straight at me,
I ducked to the side of it and bumped into a tree,
So let that be a lesson, boys, and never be like me.

Cho:
Halleluja, halleluja,
Put your nickel on the drum, save your soul, you drunken bum,
Halleluja, halleluja,
Put your nickel on the drum and be saved.

As I lay in the gutter all guzzled up with beer,
With pretzels in my hair I knew the end was near,
When along came a holy man and saved me from the hearse,
So everybody strain a gut and sing another verse. Cho:

Old Mrs. Johnson took in washing, all that she could scrub,
She busted many a button over the wash tub,
She wore her fingers down to stubs, and sometimes shed a tear,
To buy her drunken husband another glass of beer. Cho:

From here to the version I first heard from the epochal hiker/skier/singer Bill "Brigger" Briggs c. 1956, which included the "I was lying in the gutter," "village belle" and "G-L-O-R-Y" verses (pretty much like today's) is not a long step.

Ditto for the airman's drinking song parody "Throw a Nickel in the Grass, Save a Fighter Pilot's Ass," which, though a WWI origin is claimed for it, seems not to exist in any copies much earlier than Korea, or WWII at the earliest.

We still don't know the name of the wacko who perpetrated this gem, but the above is a fairly consecutive summary of its precursor in gospel and its development as a parody in the early days.

That's my nickel on your drum. Hope it helps. Enjoy! I know I will. — Bob