Cod Liver Oil (Gordon Pinsent) with lyrics and video See also: Cod Liver Oil (Ryan's Fancy) And also: Cod Liver Oil (Fine Crowd) And also: Cod Liver Oil (Rankin Street - Pre-GBS)
I'm a young married man but I'm tired of life,
Ten years I been wed to a pale sickly wife;
She has nothing to do, only sit down and cry,
Praying, oh praying to God she would die.
A friend of my own came to see me one day,
He told me my wife she was pining away;
He afterwards told me that she would get strong,
If I'd get a bottle from dear Doctor John.
Oh doctor, oh doctor, oh dear Doctor John,
Your cod liver oil is so pure and so strong;
I'm afraid of me life, I'll go down in the soil,
If me wife don't stop drinking your cod liver oil.
I bought her a bottle just for to try,
And the way that she drank it I thought she would die;
I bought her another, it vanished the same,
And then she took cod liver oil on the brain.
I bought her one more and she drank it no doubt,
Because she began to get terrible stout;
And when she got stout, then of course she got strong,
And then I got jealous of dear Doctor John.
Oh doctor, oh doctor, oh dear Doctor John,
Your cod liver oil is so pure and so strong;
I'm afraid of me life, I'll go down in the soil,
If the missus keeps drinking your cod liver oil.
Our house it resembled a big doctor's shop,
It was covered with bottles from bottom to top;
And early in the morning when the kettle do boil,
You would swear it was singing of cod liver oil.
####.... Author unknown, but often erroneously attributed to Johnny Burke [1851-1930] of St. John's, NL. Variant of a British broadside ballad, Dr. De Jongh's Cod Liver Oil, with no known publisher or date, and archived at the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads, shelfmark: Firth b.34(89).... ####
This variant was recorded by Gordon Pinsent (Roots, trk#4, 1968, Arc Sound Ltd., Recorded by Bay Studios, Toronto, Ontario, with direction and musical arrangements by Richard Gael and Patrick II).
A variant was arranged and recorded as Cod Liver Oil by Rankin Street (Pre-GBS tape - Live At The Blarneystone Pub in St. John's, NL, trk#3, 1991, NRA Productions, Ltd).
A variant was also arranged and recorded as Cod Liver Oil by Fine Crowd (Poverty's Arse, trk#6, 1995, produced and engineered at Piperstock Productions, Torbay, NL, by Dermot O'Reilly).
A variant was collected by Kenneth Peacock as Cod Liver Oil and published in Songs Of The Newfoundland Outports, Volume 1, pp.48-49, by The National Museum of Canada (1965) Crown Copyrights Reserved.
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