Have Some Madeira, M'Dear by Flanders & Swann

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: 2

Steve from IowaYour summery is incorrect... she wakes up in HIS bed, hence the line 'a beard that tickled and said'
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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