99 Bottles of Beer


"99 Bottles of Beer" is an anonymous folk song dating to the mid-20th century. It is a traditional reverse counting song in both the United States and Canada. It is popular to sing on road trips, as it has a very repetitive format which is easy to memorize and can take a long time when families sing. In particular, the song is often sung by children on long school bus trips, such as class field trips, or on Scout or Girl Guide outings.

Lyrics

The song's lyrics are as follows:

99 bottles of beer on the wall,
99 bottles of beer.


Take one down, pass it around,
98 bottles of beer on the wall...

Alternate line:

If one of those bottles should happen to fall,
98 bottles of beer on the wall...

The same verse is repeated, each time with one bottle fewer, until there is none left. Variations on the last verse following the last bottle going down include lines such as:

No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.


Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall...

Or:

No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.


We've taken them down and passed them around; now we're drunk and passed out!

Other alternate lines reads:
If that one bottle should happen to fall, what a waste of alcohol!

Or:

No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.


There's nothing else to fall, because there's no more bottles of beer on the wall.

Or:
The song does not stop at the last "1" or "0" bottles of beer but continues counting with -1 Bottles of beer on the wall Take one down, pass it around, -2 bottles of beer on the wall... continuing onward through the negative numbers

Andy Kaufman routine

The boring and time-consuming nature of the "99 Bottles of Beer" song means that probably only a minority of renditions are done to the final verse. The American comedian Andy Kaufman exploited this fact in the routine early in his career when he would actually sing all 100 verses.

Atticus

, a band from Knoxville, Tennessee recorded a thirteen and a half minute live version of the song in its entirety at a club in Glasgow, Scotland called The Cathouse. It was included in the 2001 album Figment. Rich Stewart aka Barroom Rambler listed it the number one drinking song out of 86 in an article for Modern Drunkard Magazine the following year.

Mathematically inspired variants

Donald Byrd has collected dozens of variants inspired by mathematical concepts and written by himself and others.
Byrd argues that the collection has pedagogic as well as amusement value. Among his variants are:
Other versions in Byrd's collection involve concepts including geometric progressions, differentials, Euler's identity,
complex numbers, summation notation, the Cantor set, the Fibonacci sequence, and the continuum hypothesis, among others.