Sympathy for the Devil. The Stones. Of course.
I kiind of assumed that commander Cody covered Smoke, I just didn’t say it well. And I’ve heard some other versions of “That’s What I Like About the South”, and Commader’s blows them all away.
“One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers is the correct answer to this question. The thread may now be closed.
Heh. Oops!
I’d also like to nominate “At a Medium Pace” by Adam Sandler.
To add another category that me and some friends were talking about the other day. What is the best song to get kicked out a bar by. Not kicked out as in you got in trouble, kicked out as in you are pushing closing time to the very last second.
Our concensus was “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” by Willie Nelson. Deffinately something with Willie singing anyway.
Labdad, my favourite Phil Harris novelty song is The Thing. The three syllables that are represented only by a drum fill throughout the song would lend itself well to pub recitations by imaginative drunks.
But my favourite would have to be Finnegan’s Wake, natch.
I’ve always been partial to this bit:
Now shut up and drink!
I think it may depend on the bar. The one I most often frequented wouldn’t have had Bon Jovi on the jukebox.
Our crowd all sang “Walk on the Wild Side” by Mr. Lou Reed
No one mentioned Freedbird!!!
I’ve never heard of it. Is it anything like Freebird?
It’s the past tense version of the song.
*If I’d left here tomorrow, would you have still remembered me?
'Cause I had to be travelling on then, there were too many places I’d had to see…
*
Brown Eyed Girl!!!
I guess it’s not officially a bar song, but when I was underage, my friends and I would hang at the party house, or go camping, and belt out “Five Dollar Fine” by Chris LeDeux.
Also, pretty much anything by Bocephus, especially “All My Rowdy Friends (are coming over tonight)” and “Family Tradition.”
Now, I’d have to go with Margaritaville, the perfect karaoke song for Drunk Bastards Who Can’t Sing.
The song that always got us going
Takin care of business - BTO
“Wild Thing”
“We Will Rock You”
and the classic ('cept England)
“Roddy McCorley”
If Only You Were Lonely - The Replacements
Cecilia - Simon and Garfunkel
“Oh Ce-CEEEEELLLL-ya…!”
The Last Saskatchewan Pirate by Captain Tractor usually gets everyone up on the dance floor too. That’s probably just a regional thing, though. 
Pretty much depends on where you are, I’d guess. Around here it’s damn near anything by Jimmy Buffett.
Barrett’s Privateers is moving up the list, though. It’s trivially easy to get our particular bunch of drunks to yell along with the chorus.
Granted, a number of outside observers have remarked that we seem to have weirder drunks than the average trailer-park community does.
i gotta second ‘you don’t hafta call me darlin, darlin’. I hung out at the ‘townie’ bar in college, this was a table-poundin tune.
Y’all have named a lot of good songs, but a lot of them I don’t think are well-known enough to get a crowd singing along. They’re certainly songs I love to hear in bars, but I don’t think I’d sing along.
At least in the South, the great sing-along song has got to be “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. You can hate the screw-you-hippie mentality of it, you can be a progressive Southerner, you can be a grad student in Semiotics, you can even be a transplanted Yankee (well, maybe), but that song appears to be totally irresisitible to a bar full of drunks at about an hour before last-call.
“Where the skies are so blue…”
(The Oxford American ran a great short piece on this phenomenon in the 2000 music issue, if anyone recalls.)