Irving King: “Show Me the Way to Go Home”

When I was little, my mom used to sing us a song toward the end of long car rides. I remembered it going like this:

“Show me the way to go home.
I’m tired and I wanna go to bed.
You see, I had a little drink about an hour ago,
and it went right to my head!”

For a long time I knew this simply as a family song. Then a few years back my aunt presented me with a stack of very old sheet music that had lain untouched for decades in my late grandmother’s piano bench.

This was sheet music from my grandmother’s girlhood and her teenage and college years in the early 20th century.

In that collection I was surprised and intrigued to find a vintage music sheet, circa 1925, of that old familiar song, “Show Me the Way to Go Home.”

The song is credited to Irving King, which was a pseudonym used by British songwriters Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly. But its history likely stretches further back; this post at the Folk Song and Music Hall blog notes that the song’s chorus has echoes of lyrics that originated in the late 19th or very early 20th century. The cover art, by the way, is the work of noted illustrator Hap Hadley, who also did the art for movie posters like Buster Keaton’s “The General.”

Wikipedia has a whole list of movies, plays, books, TV shows—even soccer teams—that have featured or invoked “Show Me the Way to Go Home” over the past century, but of particular note to this child of the Seventies is a scene from “Jaws.” (Shudder!)

It’s a relatively benign scene from a movie that, until recently, I’d successfully kept mostly submerged in my subconscious, because “Jaws” loomed large in my youth, first as a movie that looked too terrifying to ever see, and then, a few years later, as a “Why did I watch that?!”

The scene in question is where Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, and Roy Scheider belt out a defiant round of “Show Me the Way to Go Home” while their boat bobs in the ocean at night. They build up to hollering the chorus even as their sharp-toothed nemesis lurks nearby.

This article from the cool Daily Jaws website reflects on that moment, as well as the song’s use in TV shows and movies after “Jaws”; these include “Lost,” “A River Runs Through It,” and “Piranha”. I like these lines from the article:

“Popular culture has accepted the song [‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’] as a way to signify defiance and resolve by characters. It’s become a kind of drunken battle cry, that proclaims no matter what devils are lurking in the dark (or buried deep in our memories) we’ll sing it loud to drown out the fear.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Steven Spielberg classic. And yes, “Jaws” is a great and suspenseful movie — but I won’t be cueing it up for a rewatch anytime soon. Truth be told, when I looked up the scene with “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” I had to hit “stop” as soon as the shark began slamming into the boat’s hull.

But I have watched some other videos thanks to “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” Tangents this post has taken me on: Bono singing a snippet of the song on U2’s Zoo TV tour, Davy Jones singing the chorus in a trippy 1969 Monkees TV special (at about 50:08 in the video), a “Sesame Street” vignette featuring Lola the cow in search of a home, and even some shrunken heads crooning the song in Diagon Alley at Universal Studios Florida.

Where to find it:
“Show Me the Way to Go Home”
by Irving King
(pseudonym for Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly)

VINTAGE SHEET MUSIC: look for vintage sheet music for “Show Me the Way to Go Home” on eBay. You can also access a scan of this sheet music at the Internet Archive.
Publisher (1925): Harms Inc.
Status (2025): Out of print

DIGITAL DOWNLOAD: sheet music for “Show Me the Way to Go Home” available for purchase as a digital download on MusicNotes.com.

FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION:
- Richard Dreyfuss leading a singalong of “Show Me the Way to Go Home”
- The Ballad Index entry on earlier song, “Show Me the Way to Go Home, Babe”
- Secondhand Songs: “Show Me the Way to Go Home”
- digital download at University of Maine’s Vocal Popular Music Collection
- Audio and sheet music on YouTube via Sheet Music Singer