That Gorgonzola Cheese

My wife lately bought Gorgonzola cheese
She saw it in a shop marked ‘cheap'
She thought that her loving husband it would please
Till only to my birthday it would keep
She placed that cheese safely in a drawer
A month went by or perhaps a little more
Some friends came on my birthday
And the dinner went off great
But when the Missus put the Gorgonzola on a plate.

Oh, that Gorgonzola cheese
It wasn't over healthy I suppose
For the old tomcat fell a corpse upon the mat
When the “Niff” got up its nose
Talk about the flavour of the “crackling on the pork”
Nothing could have been so strong
As the beautiful effluvia that filled our house
When the Gorgonzola cheese went wrong.

My wife felt a bit offended just becos
The Company exclaimed “Great Scott”
Declared they'd like to know what animal it was
And asked me if a license I had got
The fire went dead clean out, and so did one
Of my old pals, who came back with a gun
Said he “Look out I'm going to fire; that cheese I mean to kill”
But when he'd smashed it all to bits, it got more lively still.

When those bits had done a waltz about the place
At ‘touch' they soon began to play
But when two pieces down the passage had a race
I thought I'd got hydrophobi-a
We burned pastilles, but lor' they did no good
Destroy that cheese we thought we never should
But when someone began to puff a good old ‘penny smoke'
The Gorgonzola cried, “I'm done it's time for me to croak.”

A fondly remembered song from the late 19th century, composed and sung by the great  Harry Champion with lyrics by Fred W Leigh. It was first published in 1894, and seems to have been immediately popular with amateur singers: there are multiple reports of it being sung in amateur concerts between 1895 and 1900.

In the mid-1890s there seem to have been an explosion in jokes and comic songs about Gorgonzola . Cartoons and short stories appeared in the “funny papers”, and it featured in at least two other Music Hall songs Gorgonzola cheese upon the brain (1895, sung by Charles Dixon) and A mother’s advice (1895, sung by TE Dunville).

It has been widely sung by traditional source singers, and folk revival singers too, usually introduced as a music hall song, so in my scheme it falls both under the heading “classic” and “folksong from the Halls”