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Relatively few modern proverbs have caught on in a big way but of those that have ‘the opera ain’t/isn’t over till the fat lady sings’ has produced sharp divisions over its origin. It is also used with surprising vagueness and lack of perception. If it is a warning not to count your chickens ‘before they are hatched,’ it is too often simply employed to express a generalized feeling that ‘it isn’t over till it’s over.’

So how did the saying come about? A report in the Washington Post (13 June 1978) had this version: ‘One day three years ago, Ralph Carpenter, who was then Texas Tech’s sports information director, declared to the press box contingent in Austin. “The rodeo ain’t over till the bull riders ride.” Stirred to that deep insight, San Antonio sports editor Dan Cook countered with, “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings”.’ Two days before this, the Times had more precisely quoted Cook as coming up with his version the previous April ‘after the basketball playoff game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Washington Bullets to illustrate that while the Spurs had won once, the series was not over yet. Bullets coach Dick Motta borrowed the phrase later during the Bullets’ eventually successful championship drive, and it became widely known and was often mistakenly attributed to him.’

However, Jeanne Hopkins, an expatriate American living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, wrote to me last year with a different view. ‘It is a reference to Kate Smith, a much beloved fat lady American singer in the 1930s and 40s. Her rendition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” signified the end of events like the World Series baseball games and political party conventions.’ Hence, possibly, the alternative version ‘the game’s not over till the fat lady sings.’ On the other hand, it has been argued that American national anthems (“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” are others) are usually sung at the start of baseball games, which would remove the point from the saying.

If the ‘opera’ version has very much meaning either, it derives from a hazy view of those sopranos with a different body image (Montserrat Caballe unaccountably springs to mind), who get to sing a big number before they die and thus bring the show to a close. But do they ever, really? In Tosca, for example, the heroine makes her final death plunge over the battlements without singing a big aria.

Whatever the case, allusive use of the proverb is very much on the increase. The Fat Lady Sings is the name of an Irish (pop) band formed c1990. After winning the presidential election last November Bill Clinton appeared at a victory party in Little Rock bearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘The Fat Lady Sang’ – which presumably meant no more than, ‘It’s over.’ Last July, tennis champion Andre Agassi, describing the surprising climax to his Wimbledon final, said, ‘I knew that it might just go 30-30 with two more aces. I didn’t hear the fat lady humming yet.’

As you would expect with a proverbial expression, the idea behind ‘the fat lady’ is nothing new. In Eric Maschwitz’s memoir No Chip on My Shoulder (1957), he recalled Julian Wylie, famous in theatrical history as ‘The Pantomime King’: ‘He had a number of favourite adages about the Theatre, one of which I have always remembered as a warning against dramatic anti-climax: “Never forget,” he used to say “that once the giant is dead, the pantomime is over!”’ Which is surely a corollary if ever there was one.

News just in: The latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1992) finds in Southern Words and Sayings by F.R. and C.R. Smith, the expressions ‘Church ain’t out till the fat lady sings.’ As the Smiths’ book was published in 1976, it would seem to suggest that the opera version of the proverb is only a wonky derivative.

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Copyright © 1993 by Nigel Rees