Have Some Madeira, M'Dear

Album: Broadway Songs (1959)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a slightly risqué song about an old letcher who lures a young maiden to his apartment and plies her with Madeira in order to get her into bed. It was half-sung, half-recited by Michael Flanders solo, accompanied by Donald Swann on piano. Flanders would wear a top hat during the number to emphasize the fact that the would-be seducer belonged to a certain class.
    In the song, before she is rendered incapably drunk, the victim remembers something her dying mother told her; she drops her glass and flees the apartment, waking up in her own bed the next morning with a headache and his words still ringing in her ear "Have some Madeira, M'Dear."
  • In his memoirs, Swann's Way, Donald Swann said that at one point the duo received a letter from a wine merchant who wrote "Please don't go on with that line about Port, it's affecting our trade." >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2

Comments: 1

  • Woody from New York, NcYour description of the end of the song is quite mistaken. It ends like this:

    Until the next morning she woke up in bed,
    With a smile on her lips and an ache in her head,
    And a beard in her ear-hole that tickled and said,
    "Have Some Madeira, M'Dear."

    She clearly succumbs to the old man's advances and obviously has a lovely time with him.
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