Anyone's Daughter

The lyrics tell a comic, increasingly bold story about a man who tries to visit women at night and is repeatedly caught by their fathers. Each encounter brings a different consequence, from being thrown in jail to facing the judge himself. By the end, the narrator claims he has fathered a child and married a rich man’s daughter. His tone shifts from frustrated and unlucky to triumphant, though his bragging may be part of the joke.

“Throwing up a brick” means tossing a brick, here to get someone’s attention at a bedroom window. “The kind of girl I didn’t oughta get” uses informal, nonstandard grammar to mean a girl he thinks he should not pursue—or one whose family will get him into trouble. “Law and order” usually refers to enforcing rules; the narrator uses it sarcastically, as if fathers invoke the law whenever he dates their daughters.

The song’s humor comes partly from repetition: each father seems more powerful than the last, while the narrator keeps behaving recklessly. His final claim that he has married a “rich man’s daughter” sounds like a victory over the social barriers that once threatened him. But it is also ambiguous: he may be boasting, and the ending does not tell us how the woman feels. The story can be read as playful exaggeration, while its casual treatment of the women and their choices may also feel dated.