Five to One

"Five to One" is a song by The Doors, from their 1968 album Waiting for the Sun.

Origin

Part of the song ("Your ballroom days are over baby/Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening/crawl across the years"), was seemingly lifted from the 19th-century hymnal and bedtime rhyme "Now the Day is Over" ("Now the day is over/Night is drawing nigh/Shadows of the evening/Steal across the sky") by Morrison. Similarly, Morrison quoted the "Christian child's prayer" in a live version of "Soul Kitchen" sung in 1969 and also altered the children's rhyme "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over The candlestick" to suit part of his poem An American Prayer ("Words dissemble/Words be quick/Words resemble walking sticks"). Morrison was possibly referring to a Dylan Thomas story entitled The Fight in Thomas' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, where the central character reads from a poem called Warp ("[...] Five into one, the one made of five into one, early/Suns distorted too late.")