One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
by George Thorogood & The Destroyers
- 136
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 59
- Danceability
- 7
- Acousticness
Rudy Toombs wrote the song as "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer", and Amos Milburn recorded it on June 30, 1953, at Audio-Video Recording studios in New York City. It was one of several drinking songs Milburn cut in the early 1950s, after "Bad, Bad Whiskey" and "Thinking and Drinking". The narrator is in a bar at closing time, trying to drink enough to forget that his girlfriend has gone, and pestering a tired bartender for one more round. Aladdin Records issued it under the name "Amos Milburn and His Aladdin Chickenshackers". It spent 14 weeks on the Billboard R&B chart and reached number two.
At clubs, Milburn lined three shot glasses along the top of his piano. They were filled often. He said he practiced what he preached.
John Lee Hooker recorded it in Chicago in 1966 for the Chess album The Real Folk Blues. The biographer Charles Shaar Murray called Hooker's treatment "Hookerization": he edited the verses down, filled the gaps with narrative and dialogue, and set it to a rocking cross between a South Side shuffle and his signature boogie. George Thorogood recorded his own take in 1977.
One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.