How old is the tradition of referring to a long and tedious song or part of a song as "forty-seven verses"?I happened to be looking at the Wikipedia article on "47 (number)" and saw a section about 47 as an in-joke, a tradition that started at Pomona College in 1964 and infected almost the entire Star Trek franchise. Well, having grown up listening to the Weavers, I instantly remembered some dialogue on "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall" (recorded 1955, released 1957), I think just after they sing "Greensleeves". One of the men asks about the full version and Frank Hayes says
... all forty-seven verses of it, each one more boring than the last.Then he starts in on a talking blues:
'I gave thee this, I gave thee that, and yet(st) thou wouldst not love me.'Alas, my love, you do me wrong
To treat me so discourteously
When I have suffered oh, so long,
Delighting in your company.
Greensleeves ... was all my joy.
Greensleeves ... my heart and soul.I wondered if there's a history behind this that would take it even further back. Wikipedia mentions a connection in Talking blues, but Lyrics wikia shows that to be Frank Hayes as well, in a talking blues parody of "Matty Groves" titled "Like A Lamb To The Slaughter":
In the interests of brevity, I'll omit some of the more disposable parts of the song.(I'd like to quote more of that parody, but that'd involve more HTML coding and copyright questions, so go read it for yourself!)
Like the section where they get undressed.
All forty-seven verses of it.When I came here, I found three possible links:
- Several versions of the same song:
Caroline's version of "Tam Lin" has only forty-seven verses, not the fifty-five that Michael Cooney sings.- Historical basis for Anachie Gordon:
So now it's everybody dead and it's taken us forty-seven verses to get to such an unsatisfying conclusion.- BS: It ain't folk if ?:
If it ain't got forty seven versesThese are all light-hearted, not literal; obviously the 2nd and 3rd are, and I think the 1st as well. So they're pretty clearly part of the same tradition, but obviously well after Frank Hayes. Does it go back any further than Frank?