Ten Songs About Coffee (And Not The Usual Ones Either)
3rd June 2013 by
Coffee, rather like love, loss, drugs and alcohol, has often inspired songwriters. But think of songs where coffee is the theme and only a handful of famous ones spring to mind. There’s Black Coffee – as recorded by, amongst others, Ella Fitzgerald – Blur’s Coffee and TV, Frank Sinatra singing about an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, and maybe Bob Dylan’s duet with Emmylou Harris on One More Cup Of Coffee from 1976.
But in Manchester we like to delve a bit deeper with our music, so here’s a selection of some lesser known songs about coffee to get you in the mood for the Chorlton Coffee Festival.
Coffee House Blues – Lightnin’ Hopkins
To kick us off, it’s a blues legend, with a warning to anyone who goes out to get coffee and comes home empty handed…
Forty Cups of Coffee – Ella Mae Morse
Ella Mae may have had a long wait in this bluesy swinger, but even we would advise you against forty cups of coffee in one day…
Have Another Espresso – Shel Silverstein
For someone who drank that many espressos, Shel was certainly pretty cool and zen. He also seemed to like to pick up girls in coffee shops…
Taylor The Latte Boy – Marcy Heisler & Zina Goldrich
Speaking of coffee shop romance, here’s a song about being (a little creepily?) obsessed with a barista. Maybe you could find a special someone in Chorlton who makes great coffee to have a similar crush on? This is the original version of a song made famous in the US by Kristin Chenoweth…
Coffee Mug – Decedents
Some metal for you now. Coffee and metal. That’s all…
Cafe – Eddie Palmieri
Cafe Colao is a strong Puerto Rican brew made by passing boling water through a cotton drip bag of coffee. Salsa heavyweight Eddie Palmieri was obviously keen on it, as it’s the theme for this Latin classic…
Coffee In A Cardboard Cup – Mandy Patinkin
New Yorkers are well known for it’s coffee habit, but in this performance of a song from the Broadway musical 70, Girls, 70, musical, Mandy Patinkin has a little moan about the pace of it all. It seems takeaway coffee is symbolic of all that’s wrong with modern life. Luckily, we hope to retain some of the sophistication of cafe culture at the festival, so this shouldn’t be a problem…
Smokey Joes Cafe – The Robins
There may not have been too much coffee drunk at Smokey Joes (it seems beans were the order of the day), but in this 50s R’nB classic, The Robins do a good job of advertising the place…
Black Coffee – Humble Pie
A stonking performance of one of the many songs titled Black Coffee. This one’s from The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973, featuring Steve Marriot from the Small Faces. You can almost smell the brew…
Totally Wired – The Fall
We wouldn’t be true to our Manchester setting if we didn’t have a Manchester band in the list somewhere. Totally Wired came closest to a coffee song, although I think Mark E Smith would be the first to admit that he might have used more than caffeine to keep him going. In fact, he does so in the lyrics here (although we’ll be sticking to coffee, thanks)…
So, there ends our shortlist of alternative coffee songs, but as this is by no means a definitive list, please feel free to let us know of more in the comments. If you’d like to check out some other songs that didn’t make the shortlist, there’s a Spotify Playlist available here. Also, if all this caffeine music inspires you to want a nice cup of coffee, don’t forget to check out our participating cafes and festival events!
‘What I want is a proper cup of coffee made in a proper copper coffee pot’ is my favourite coffee song. I used to love the cafe in Mora, Sweden, where you could help yourself to as much coffee as you could drink – from copper coffee pots! Sadly, they’d disappeared last time I went.
Adaire to Dance from Derby has a terrific dance routine called Coffee Shop Culture… http://www.adairetodance.co.uk/Adaire%20To%20Dance/Coffee%20Shop%20Culture.html