“The people throwing pennies in my soup,
Expecting me to be ashamed of you…”
Is the throwing of pennies into someone’s soup a thing, or do you think it just sounded good to the writer?
This is the song: https://youtu.be/Cl7ljxy_j38
I vote for Roy “I can hear the grass grow” Wood just having fun putting words together.
That said, my Appalachian grandparents would put coins in their good-luck-new-years black eyed peas. I doubt Dr. Heimlich would approve.
Eww. Black eyed peas are delicious. Don’t ruin them by tossing filthy coins in there.
Just in case people are wondering, since it wasn’t mentioned in the OP, the lyrics are from the song “It Wasn’t My Idea To Dance” by the Move, from their fourth and final album Message from the Country released in 1971.
The fact that it was by The Move, and written by Roy Wood (the band, and Wood, were from the English city of Birmingham), suggests to me that it likely has nothing to do with the black-eyed peas tradition (which, AIUI, came from Blacks in the southern U.S.). I’m going to guess that there’s no particular reference/meaning to the lyrics, it just sounded good/fun to them.
Agreed. The lyrics are full of metaphors, and I don’t think much of anything is literal in the song.
Is there a reason you didn’t actually tell us what song you were asking about in the OP?
(Yeah, I know you linked to it, but a lot of us don’t want to have to open a video to know what an OP is talking about.)
That would be a brain fart on my part.
My grandmother did something similar with cabbage.
She would put cabbage in black-eyed peas?
Enough cabbage to matter and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise.
No. She would put a coin (I want to say it was a silver dollar, but she died in 1993, so I may be misremembering) into the cabbage she was boiling.
Apparently an Appalachian thing, esp. among those of Scottish and Irish descent. And, it was indeed supposed to be a silver coin of some sort, often a dime.
Well, this was the Louisville, Kentucky area, so that tracks.
My Scottish Grandma put a dime in her Christmas figgy pudding. She’d wrap it in foil so it was maybe slightly less unsanitary. Whoever got the dime in their slice was supposed to have good luck throughout the coming year.