Meaning
To work, perform, or provide a service in order to earn something you want, especially a meal, hospitality, or a favour, rather than receiving it for free. Once literal for travelling performers, it is now mostly figurative and covers any situation where a reward must be earned through effort. Collins COBUILD labels it old-fashioned, so it suits warm or wry contexts more than formal prose. The Bedlam beggar origin story should be flagged as unverified whenever repeated. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The saying was already proverbial by the seventeenth century, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs as summarized by Wikipedia, and a version is noted in the 1607 play The Knight of the Burning Pestle. It is best known from the nursery rhyme Little Tommy Tucker, who sings for his supper, first printed in four lines in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book around 1744 and in its full eight-line form in Mother Goose's Melody around 1765. A popular backstory credits the Bedlam beggars or Abraham-Men, vagrants who claimed to be freed inmates of Bethlem Hospital and lived by begging songs - the Tom o' Bedlam ballad probably dates from the early 1600s - but Wikipedia plainly notes that the claim inmates were released with a licence to beg is probably untrue, and no reliable source directly ties these beggars to the idiom, so that story is folklore. The phrase gained fresh American currency from the Rodgers and Hart song Sing for Your Supper in the 1938 Broadway musical The Boys from Syracuse.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- sing for its supper
- sing for one's supper
- sing for their supper
Usage Examples
- The hotel lets guests stay free, but everyone sings for their supper by helping with the breakfast shift each morning.
- If you want a seat at the investors' dinner, be prepared to sing for your supper and pitch your idea clearly.
- Marta refuses a free lunch, so she is singing for her supper tonight by cooking for the entire sales team.