Who was the first “Lover – not a fighter”

Factual Questions
1

Who came up with the famous quote “I’m a lover, not a fighter” and when?

2

Michael Jackson said it to Paul McCartney on the song “The Girl is Mine.”

I’m pretty sure that was on the Thriller album, so 1981ish.

That’s the earliest that lil ole me can come up with, but I am not a cunning linguist.

3

Errol Flynn

4

1989?!

I’m assuming this is an old r’n’b line that goes back decades, but the song “I’m a Lover Not a Fighter” appears on The Kinks’ 1964 album The Kinks.

Dwayne Hickman peformed it as Dobie Gillis in 1960.

Lazy Lester recorded the song for the Excello label in 1958. Apparently his label mate (or was it a pseudonym?) Lightnin’ Slim recorded the same song on that label.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if another Doper comes along and traces back as a blues line in the 1920s. Things get a little sketchy in the genre when it comes to who “borrowed” waht from whom.

Michael Jackson?! Sheesh… :stuck_out_tongue:

5

From IMDB;

I’m pretty sure I saw (heard) it in one of those swashbuckling movies, though.
Valentino? I’ll keep searching.
Did people say “chill” in '63?

6

I was going to guess Valentino too, but I’m wondering if there’s a source in really old literature. I’m trying to look it up.

7

I seem to recall that Homer, in the Illiad refers to Hector as ‘a fighter, rather than a lover’ (presumably part of the reason that Helen of Troy leaves him and runs away with the Greek Paris).

Also, in the Odyssey, a rival suitor refers to the disguised Ulysses as a ‘suitor with no skill in hard fighting’ (shortly before he kills them all).

I don’t know the actual Greek phrases Homer used, but these seem fairly close to “a lover, not a fighter”. And this is about 2,500 years before any of the other cites. I think this is a pretty old phrase.

8

That’s the one I was thinking of. Only I thought it was in the Aeneid somewhere. I find it so strange that there’s nothing apporaching it in my book of quotations.

Thanks, t-bonham. So if Hector was the fighter-not-lover, then the answer to the OP is Paris as the lover-not-fighter?

9

Apparently Helen of Troy thought so. :slight_smile: