“Seven Drunken Nights” is a humorous Irish folk song most famously performed by The Dubliners. It is a variation of the Scottish folk song “Our Goodman”. It tells the story of a gullible drunkard returning night after night to see new evidence of his wife’s lover, only to be taken in by increasingly implausible explanations. “Our Goodman” was collected in Scotland in the 1770s. Another version was found in a London broadside of the 1760s entitled “The Merry Cuckold and the Kind Wife”. The broadside was translated into German, and spread into Hungary and Scandinavia. Unusually for such a popular and widespread song, it appears in only a few nineteenth century broadsides. In the version known as “Seven Nights Drunk”, each night is a verse, followed by a chorus, in which the narrator comes home in a drunken state to find evidence of another man having been with his wife, which she explains away, not entirely convincingly. The song also became part of American folk culture, both through Irish-Americans and through the blues tradition. The song passed from oral tradition to a global mass market with The Dubliners recording of “Seven Drunken Nights”.
Songs with Banjo from Harold Hagler
