One for my baby
lyrics by Johnny Mercer music by Harold Arlen
Its quarter to three,
Theres no one in the place cept you and me
So set em up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know
Were drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my baby
And one more for the road
I know the routine
Put another nickel in that there machine
Im feeling so bad
Wont you make the music easy and sad
I could tell you a lot
But you gotta to be true to your code
So make it one for my baby
And one more for the road
Youd never know it
But buddy Im a kind of poet
And Ive got a lot of things I wanna say
And if Im gloomy, please listen to me
Till its all, all talked away
Well, thats how it goes
And joe I know youre gettin anxious to close
So thanks for the cheer
I hope you didnt mind
My bending your ear
But this torch that I found
Its gotta be drowned
Or it soon might explode
So make it one for my baby
And one more for the road
__________________________________
Also
Mark Steyn: One for the road -
SteynOnLine.com ^ | October, 2006 | Mark Steyn
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1743255/posts
Posted on 11/23/2006 9:06:52 PM CST by UnklGene
ONE FOR THE ROAD - Bill Miller, 19152006
Frank Sinatra called himself a saloon singer, because thats where he used to sing, way back when in Jersey juke joints and road houses. Not for long. He was too good, even then. But for a while, if you headed up to the Rustic Cabin on Route 9W in the Garden State, they had this pianist pushing a little half-piano from table to table and the waiter would sing with him and they had a tip jar on the lid and you couldnt help noticing the kid sang awful good for a waiter, and pretty soon the singing was earning him, as he figured it, about 15 clams a week. Thirty, forty, fifty years later, week in, week out, the same singing waiter with full supporting orchestra was barreling through some grim rock stadium on the edge of a strip mall in some nondescript suburb. And, midway through the set, the lights would dim and Frank Sinatra would announce that he would now sing a saloon song and proceed to shrink whichever sterile aircraft hangar hed been booked into down to the size of those poky smoky New Jersey saloons of his youth. There were the old props the tumbler, the cigarette and the scene-setting grew ever more ornate over the years, expanding into an almighty pile-up of retro hipsterisms as Frank prepared us for the tale of some emblematic long-lost loser whose chick split, flew the coop, cleaned out his stash and left him cryin into a gallon of Muscatel. And underneath a tinkly tipsy barroom piano intro would begin, and Sinatra would invite us to assume the position of the bartender and listen to the old, old story:
(snip)
Quite simply, one of the greatest lyrics ever.