..Drinking Songs
A drinking song is a song sung while drinking, that is, consuming alcohol. Some drinking songs are about drink, but many are not. Groups which still have a drinking song tradition include rugby players, hash house harriers, air force fighter pilots and fraternities. Most of drinking songs are folksongs and show variation from person to person and region to region in both the words and in the tunes used for the song.
Some drinking songs
Common drinking songs include Beer, beer, beer, The Fields of Athenry, Eisgekühlter Bommerlunder, Limericks, The Lady in Red, Barnacle Bill the Sailor, I Used to Work in Chicago, Walking Down Canal Street, Bestiality's Best, The Goddamned Dutch, Wishing All The Ladies, In Mobile, The S&M Man, Seven Drunken Nights and My Name is Jack. The Star Spangled Banner's tune is the same as an old English drinking song (To Anacreon in Heaven).
The spiritual "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" is used as a drinking song among many hash harriers and rugby players with obscene gestures associated with the lyrics. This song is heightened to a drinking game by air force fighter pilots. The first person to fail to correctly make the gestures has to buy the next round of drinks.
Drinking songs in other languages
Drinking songs are sometimes referred to by the German name Trinklied.
In Sweden, where they are called Dryckesvisor, traditions are upheld to an unusual degree in modern European context. There are songs associated with christmas, Midsummer, and other celebrations sometimes unique to Sweden. One very often sung is "Helan går". Although singing songs from Fredmans Epistlar is less usual, Carl Michael Bellman's influence on the Swedish customary preoccupation with the drinking song is considerable.
Drinking songs are an integral part of Finnish student culture, in no small part because of Swedish influence on sitsit. Local songs can be either in Finnish or in Swedish, and either played straight or self-subverting, by e.g. lapsing into Finnish in a Swedish song, or having a "song" consist entirely of the word "NOW!" followed by drinking.
Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/
