When I first decided on the title for this column I had in mind a song from long ago by an undoubtedly long-forgotten band, The Fugs. Their song Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, opened with a lengthy litany of gimmees, shouted, mantra-like, no doubt, in order to create the impression of a consumer society run amuck. As I've done in the past, I started to run a search on the song, and not remembering its name at first, sought out instead "gimme, gimme, gimme". I admit to having been quite surprised with the number of resuts I found:

A search at the Yahoo! Lyrics search brings up 775 song titles with the word Gimme. Many of these are covers of the same song, and I didn't try and count them all, but it's a fair guess that about 200 different titles veritably beg to be given something. This is, undoubtedly, too many to mention, but a few of the items asked for can be noted:

Gimme a break, a kiss, a little sign, a penny, a rainbow, a raise, a riot, a room, a slice, a smile, a smoke, a stone.

The only other triple Gimme I could find (though this doesn't mean they aren't out there) was a song recorded by ABBA entitled Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight). This song was apparently highly popular.

Among the double Gimmes, perhaps the best known is that of the Spencer Davis Group (and countless others) when Stevie Winwood cried out to give him some lovin'.

Two that I probably should have thought of without searching are:

Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer sung by Bessie Smith (here) and by Billie Holiday, and

Gimme that Wine, a Lambert, Hendricks and Ross classic, the lyrics of which I can't seem to find, though I did come across a snippet of the music.