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A good man is hard to findMeaningA modern-day proverb, bemoaning the difficulty of finding a suitable male partner. OriginThis phrase was coined by Eddie Green, as the title of his song A Good Man Is Hard To Find. This was composed in 1918 and first offered for sale as a piano roll in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, on 12th December that year (just in time for Christmas - a bargain at 90 cents):
A similar though more general outlook was expressed in the Bible, Micah 7:2 (King James Version):
We don't know if Eddie Green was an Old Testament scholar, but it seems unlikely that he got the line from Micah.
Sophie Tucker was born Sophie Kalish; she changed her name and adopted Tucker as a stage name, following a brief marriage to Louis Tuck. It is interesting to speculate whether she was influenced to use Tucker by the style of dress she often wore on stage - see best bib and tucker. In the good man/good woman stakes, men got in a pre-emptive strike in the 17th century. Abraham Darcie's work The originall of idolatries, or the birth of heresies, 1624, includes this opinion:
More recently, and in what must be one of the most convoluted titles ever to grace a bookstand, we have Jo Lynne Pool's 1995 book title - A Good Man Is Hard To Find Unless You Ask God To Be Head Of Your Search Committee. See also - a hard man is good to find. See also: the List of Proverbs. Phrasefinder is also on
Tudor Phrases and Sayings - a book on the meanings and origins of the phrases and sayings that Shakespeare and Henry VIII used that we use still use every day. |
The best-known version of the song was recorded by Sophie Tucker, who adopted it as a signature tune. She was a little more charitable in her delivery of the lyric and sang the second line as "You may get the other kind". 
