This references "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" an American folk song, here sung by The Barry Sisters with the Nat King Cole Trio
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=jL1Tb8lO_b8
Lyrics: https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858980331/
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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The Far Side
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About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
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Some more history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ve_Been_Working_on_the_Railroad
The "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" section, with its noticeably different melody, is actually an older song that has been absorbed by "I've Been Working on the Railroad". It was published as "Old Joe, or Somebody in the House with Dinah" in London in the 1830s or '40s, with music credited to J.H. Cave. "Dinah" was a generic name for a slave woman and, by extension, any woman of African-American descent.
This extra verse confirms what I figured the lyrics were about:
Someone's makin' love to Dinah
Someone's making love I know.
Someone's making love to Dinah
'Cause I can't hear the old banjo!
I didn't know about the Dinah thing, and the extant verse, TIL and thanks!
I thought I'd heard the name Dinah before, but I couldn't place it.