Gold Fever

Album: Paint Your Wagon soundtrack (1969)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Gold Fever" is the last song in the 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon. Composed by André Previn and written by Alan Jay Lerner, it is performed by Clint Eastwood as Pardner in a house of ill-repute.

    By this time, with the Gold Rush as good as over, and having been evicted from the cabin he shared with his mistress and her husband, he is disillusioned with his way of life if not life itself, and is thinking of moving on.

    "Gold Fever" does not appear in the original 1951 Broadway production. >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England

Comments: 1

  • Lalah from AlaskaHe came west with his brother to homestead. When their wagon falls down a ravine and his brother dies, the prospectors dig a grave. As last rights are said, Lee Marvin's character sees gold in the hole and that's how Clint becomes his "Pardner". He shares all of the claim, even the wife who was won at auction. She was auctioned because the prospectors told her first husband,a Mormon, that "It t'wern't right for a man to have two wives" in a town where the population was men. She figured that if her first husband could have two wives, why couldn't she have two husbands?
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