Saturday, May 26, 2012

Misses Rheingold

The New York Times reports on a reunion of Misses Rheingold (or Miss Rheingolds). The reunion took place in conjunction with a New-York Historical Society exhibit on beer in New York City: Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History.

For New Yorkers of a certain age, Rheingold is synonymous with beer. I knew the jingle, or one version of it, as a child:

My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.
Ask for Rheingold whenever you buy beer.
It’s refreshing, not sweet;
It’s the extra-dry treat.
Won’t you try extra-dry Rheingold beer?
Here is a ninety-three-year-old woman singing another version of the lyrics. And here is a commercial with a third version.

On the rare occasions when my parents split a can of beer with lunch on a Saturday or Sunday, I would have a sip in a Dixie. Cold cuts, potato salad, and beer still seem to me to constitute the Platonic form of lunch.

A related post
SCHAEFER

[I knew the Schaefer jingle too. Is it so wrong for a child to sing beer jingles?]

comments: 3

Daughter Number Three said...

Growing up in upstate New York, I don't recall the Rheingold jingle so much as the Schaefer. The absurdity of "one beer to have when you're having more than one" went right past me at the time.

Elaine Fine said...

You can find the music for Waldteufel's Estudiantina here, and, perhaps the source for the beginning of the melody here, which is a few measures of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1 (in 2/4 time!).

How did I find it? I used the Search By Melody feature on the IMSLP. You need to enable Java in your browser (or put in an exception for IMSLP), but it's definitely worth it. You can plunk out any melody on an on-screen keyboard, and find all the places that it is used in the huge IMSLP library.

Michael Leddy said...

Daughter Number Three, do beers still sell by means of jingles? I can’t remember the last time I heard the Budweiser jingle.

Thanks, Elaine, for the jingle’s source(s) and for explaining how to use the IMSLP.