Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer

DESCRIPTION: Need I really tell you? "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, Ninety-nine bottles of beer, Take one down and pass it around, Ninety-eight bottles of beer...." And so on, ad nauseum, drunkenness, or exhaustion
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1910 (Brown)
KEYWORDS: drink nonballad campsong | counting
FOUND IN: Britain US(MW,So)
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Randolph 456, "Ninety-Nine Blue Bottles" (1 text, 1 tune)
Brown/Belden/Hudson-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore3 190, "Ninety-Nine Blue Bottles" (1 text)
Shay-BarroomBallads/PiousFriendsDrunkenCompanions, p. 17, "Forty-nine Bottles" (1 text, 1 tune)
Nettleingham-TommysTunes, #93, "Ninety-Nine Bottles on the Wall" (1 text, 1 tune)
Abrahams-JumpRopeRhymes, #546, "Ten black bottles, Sitting on a fence" (1 text)
NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal, Gloria Dickens, "Childhood Songs from North Carolina" Vol. XXI, No. 1 (Apr 1973), p. 7, "(There are ten green bottles a-stainding on the wall)"; "(A hundred bottles of beer on the wall) (2 texts)
LibraryThingCampSongsThread, post 20, "99 bottles of beer on the wall" (2 mentions, from user hailelib, John5918, posted August 28, 2021; in John5918's version it is "Ten green bottles, standing on a wall")
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, pp. 384-385, 535, "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall"/"Ten Green Bottles"/"Forty Bottles of Beer on the Wall" (notes only)
DT, BOT99*
Roud #7603
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Eight Little Cylinders" (counting)
cf. "Ten Little Injuns" (counting)
NOTES [73 words]: Randolph's and Brown's texts, obviously, refers to "blue bottles" rather than "bottles of beer," and one of the NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal texts is about green bottles; might this be an attempt to clean up the song for a temperate audience?
I will admit amazement that neither Randolph nor Brown seems to know this in its common form -- but then, they probably were born in the days before school buses took students on field trips. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: R456

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