Authors: Emma Donoghue
“Au Clair de la Lune” (“By the Light of the Moon”)
This French song seems to have begun in the late 1770s as a
contredanse
tune (a Gallic variant of English country dancing) known as “La Rémouleuse” (“The Grinder Girl”), “Air du Gagne-Petit” (“The Low-Earner’s Tune”), or “En Roulant Ma Brouette” (“Rolling My Barrow”). It is often attributed to the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, apparently for no better reason than his preeminence in French baroque music. The tune acquired these lyrics about a pair of lovers by the time of its first publication as “Au Clair de la Lune” in 1843 in
Chants et Chansons Populaires de la France
(
Popular Songs and Ballads of France
) and finally ended up as a nursery rhyme.
On April 9, 1860, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made a phonautograph recording (a transcription of sound waves as a line on paper) of a ten-second snippet of “Au Clair de la Lune,” which seems to be the earliest recognizable record of the human voice and of instrumental music. In 2000, U.S. researchers converted the graph back to sound. The result was so high-pitched that they thought it was the voice of a girl, perhaps Martinville’s daughter, but when they played it at the correct, slower speed, it turned out to be a man singing, probably the inventor himself. You can listen to it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edouard-Léon_Scott_de_Martinville.
“Little Brown Jug”
This American ode to committed drinking was published in 1869 by “Eastburn,” the pseudonym, and middle name, of Joseph Winner (1837–1918), and it was the one real hit among his more than twenty known songs. Like many composer’s works, this song was then absorbed into the folk canon, going through many variations over the next century and a half.
CHAPTER II: I HAVE GOT THE BLUES
“For Work I’m Too Lazy”
The quatrain Jenny sings here is a maverick or floating stanza—meaning one of those pieces of debris that pop up over and over in the river of folk music. This is the earliest published version of the lines I have found, in a variant of “Rye Whiskey” collected by Newton Gaines from a cowboy friend in Texas in 1926. The quatrain often turns up in songs of the “Rye Whiskey” family (including “Jack o’ Diamonds,” “The Cuckoo,” and “The Sporting Cowboy”), which have British origins but are most popular in the United States. It also appears as a stand-alone fragment entitled “For (the) Work I’m Too Lazy.”
Sometimes
tie-hacking
(cutting lumber into railroad ties) replaces the generic
work
as the task that’s too demanding, while (amusingly)
investment
can substitute for
begging
, but the third term is usually
train-robbing
, and
gambling
is the life the singer always seems to choose in the last line.
“The Flying Trapeze,” aka “The (Daring Young) Man on the Flying Trapeze”
This most famous of circus songs is an English tribute to Jules Léotard, the French acrobat who pioneered the art of the flying trapeze at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris in 1859 and whose name would later be immortalized as the term for a one-piece costume. Published in 1867, it had words by “George Leybourne” (the stage name of music-hall performer Joe Saunders, 1842–1884) with music by Gaston Lyle, arranged by Alfred Lee (1839–1906).
Interestingly, the song is as much about daring young cross-dressing women as daring young men, since it’s a complaint by a man that his beloved has been seduced away from him by a circus man who makes her pass as a boy and perform on the trapeze to support him financially.
“I Have Got the Blues”
This playful lament about a hangover, published in 1850, seems to have been the first song with
the blues
in the title. (It’s given as “I Have Got the Blues To Day!: A Comic Ballad” on the cover of the sheet music, but more simply as “I Have Got the Blues” inside.) The words are by Miss Sarah M. Graham with music by Gustave Blessner (1808–1888), a well-known composer of waltzes and mazurkas who taught school in New York State and collaborated with Graham on at least one other comic song, “Nanny’s Mammy.”
“Près des Remparts de Séville” (“By the Ramparts of Seville,” aka “Seguidilla”)
After getting arrested for a knife fight, the heroine of
Carmen
(1875) sings this glorious aria in order to seduce the hero into untying her bound hands. The music is by Georges Bizet (1838–1875), a French composer now famous for this, his final opera, but who died of a heart attack at thirty-six, convinced that
Carmen
was a total failure. The words are by Henri Meilhac (1831–1897) and Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908), collaborators for two decades; they based the libretto on the 1845 novella of the same name by Prosper Mérimée, and he in turn was probably influenced by Aleksandr Pushkin’s narrative poem
The Gypsies
(1824).
CHAPTER III: THERE’S THE CITY
“I’m a Pilgrim”
This hymn, an allegory about a journey through “this country so dark and dreary,” was popular in white Southern worship. The words were published anonymously as “I’m a Pilgrim” in
The Southern Zion’s Songster
(1864) but were actually adapted from Mary Stanley Bunch Dana Schindler’s “A Pilgrim and a Stranger” (in her
The Northern Harp
, 1841), set to the Italian tune “Buona Notte.” (After publishing two volumes of Calvinist hymns, the poet—best known as “Mrs. Dana”—shocked her followers by converting to Unitarianism, and ended up as an Episcopalian.)
By the 1880s, “I’m a Pilgrim” had been adopted and adapted by black churches, contributing greatly to the famous spiritual known from the 1920s variously as “A City Called Heaven,” “Poor Pilgrim,” “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” “Tossed and Driven,” and “Trying to Make Heaven My Home.” “I’m a Pilgrim” is an ancestor to a whole family of songs on the wayfaring-stranger theme in the gospel/folk/bluegrass/country repertoire.
CHAPTER IV: SOMEBODY’S WATCHING
“Musieu Bainjo,” aka “M’sieu/Misieu/Monsieu/Miché/Michi Bainjo,” and “Voyez Ce Mulet Là” (“Mister Banjo,” aka “Look at This Buck Here”)
This was described by its editors (in
Slave Songs of the United States
, 1867) as a slave song heard before the Civil War by a lady correspondent of theirs at the Good Hope Plantation, St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. They gave it in more or less standard French, but an 1887 editor claimed that it was usually sung in Creole patois, as follows:
“Gardé piti milate, ti banjo! / Badine dan lamain, ti banjo! / Chapo en ho côté, ti banjo.”
Others have suggested a minstrel-show origin for this song.
Mulet
here is usually translated as “dandy,” but in fact it has several related meanings: buck (as in a male deer, but often used of male slaves in English), mule, and mulatto (a term that derives from the Spanish word for mule). The type of dandy the song is satirizing is an urban free man of color nicknamed for the banjo, the most popular instrument among black musicians. The tune echoes several famous dances: the bamboula, the habanera, and the cakewalk.
“Le Temps des Cerises” (“Cherry-Time”)
This tear-jerking ballad was written by the French revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Clément (1836–1903) during his exile in Belgium and set to music and published in 1871 by his friend the tenor Antoine Renard (1825–1872). An unsubstantiated story claims that Clément traded Renard the rights to the lyrics in exchange for a fur coat. When Clément joined the cause of the working-class Communards in Paris in 1870, they took up this song as their anthem.
“Commence Ye Darkies All!,” aka “Commence Ye Darkies” and “Commence, You Niggers All”
“When I go out to promenade” is a fourth verse added (by 1854) to a song first published in 1849 as “Commence Ye Darkies All!” by W. D. Corrister. A white guitarist/songwriter who was based in New York in the 1840s and in San Francisco in the 1850s, Corrister played with many early blackface-minstrel groups. Interestingly, the extra “promenade” verse was remembered the longest, turning up without attribution in journalism and fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“The Housekeeper’s Tragedy,” aka “The Housekeeper’s Woes/Complaint/Lament,” “Life Is a Toil,” and “Trouble and Dirt”
“There’s too much of worriment goes to a bonnet” is the third of nine verses of a poem published as “The Housekeeper’s Tragedy” in
Arthur’s Lady’s Home Magazine
, volume 37 (1871), by Eliza Sproat Turner (1826–1903), who included it in her 1872 collection
Out-of-Door Rhymes
. Turner was a widely published writer and activist in women’s, antislavery, and anti-animal-cruelty causes. The piece appeared as a five-stanza song called “The Housekeeper’s Woes” (attributed to an H. A. Fletcher) in 1871’s
It’s Naughty But It’s Nice Songster
, and then with the four additional stanzas, attributed to H. A. Fechter, in an 1887 folio edited by Richard A. Saalfield,
Comical, Topical and Mottoe Songs
. The melody published in 1887 is quite different from the usual tune taken down with these lyrics in various parts of America from the 1880s on, and nothing is known about the composer of either.
Scholars disagree about whether the song is a feminist protest or a piece of music-hall mockery. I incline to the former, because I find it more credible that jokers would have borrowed Turner’s text for their own satirical purposes than that she would have taken a satire and offered it as sincere.
“Oh, California,” aka “The California Song,” “I Came from Salem City,” “The Gold-Digger’s Song,” and “Oh, Ann Eliza”
This was known all over the world as the theme song of the 1849 California Gold Rush. It is sung to the melody of—and in some ways is a parody of—the minstrel song “Oh! Susanna” (1848) by Stephen Foster (1826–1864), known as “the father of American music.” The original lyrics were attributed to an immigrant called Jonathan Nichols, and subsequent variants range widely in setting and detail; the version Jenny and Blanche hear was published in
Out West
in 1904.
“Somebody’s Darlin’”
This began as a widely loved American Civil War poem for a dead soldier, generally attributed to French immigrant Marie Ravenal de la Coste. At least seven different people set it to music during the 1860s, but the only version that has lasted is the one published in 1864 by John Hill Hewitt (1801–1890), the New York–born “Bard of the Confederacy.”
CHAPTER V:
VIVE LA ROSE
“There’s a Good Time Coming”
These words are from a utopian vision poem (1846) by Scottish writer Charles Mackay (1812–1889), now remembered for his
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
. The poem was set to music by an English composer Henry Russell and—independently—by an American one, Stephen Foster (1826–1864). Foster wrote 156 songs, including a long string of hits, but made little from them due to the weakness of copyright law in his day, and he died at thirty-seven with thirty-eight cents in his pocket.
“If You’ve Only Got a Mustache”
This 1864 song has a tune by Stephen Foster and lyrics by his friend George Cooper (1840–1927), who often wrote comic songs for Foster and other composers.
“Vive la Rose” (“Long Live the Rose”), aka “La Méchante” (“The Wicked One”) and “Mon Amant Me Delaisse” (“My Lover Is Leaving Me”)
This folk song about betrayal has been collected in different regions of France; the lyrics vary, and the refrain is shared with several other songs. “Vive la Rose” is often described as eighteenth century in origin but does not seem to have been published before its inclusion in
Chants et Chansons Populaires des Provinces de l’Ouest
(
Songs and Popular Ballads of the Western Provinces
, 1866), which is the version Jenny sings here.
“The Love Sick Frog,” aka “The Bull Frog,” “The Bullfrog Song,” “Frog Went a-Courtin’,” “A Frog He Would a-Wooin’ Go,” “A Frog Went a-Walkin’,” “Frog in the Well,” “The Frog’s Wooing,” “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O,” “There Lived/Was a Puddie/Puggie in the Well,” and “Crambone”
This perennially popular ballad began in Scots in the mid-sixteenth century, with English versions published as early as 1611. The variant Jenny sings was published as “The Love Sick Frog” in Dublin around 1807, with music for piano or harp by Irish singer/instrumentalist/composer Thomas Simpson Cooke (1782–1848). David Hyland has created a magnificent compilation of over 170 verses of this song from twenty-nine sources at http://home.earthlink.net/~highying/froggy/froggy.html.
CHAPTER VI: I HARDLY KNEW YE
“Home! Sweet Home!,” aka “Home, Sweet Home”
This song is adapted from the 1823 opera
Clari, Maid of Milan,
with libretto by expat American actor/dramatist John Howard Payne (1791–1852) and music—based on a Sicilian tune—by the English composer Sir Henry Bishop (1786–1855). It became popular with troops on both sides of the American Civil War and was said to have been banned in Union army camps for its tendency to incite nostalgia and therefore desertion.
“Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye”
In a short, impeccable study with the tongue-in-cheek title of
“The Best Antiwar Song Ever Written”
(2012), Jonathan Lighter demolishes the legend of this song as a tragic, antiwar eighteenth-century Irish folk ballad that was distorted into the pro-war “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” by Patrick Gilmore in 1863. Lighter establishes that “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye” was composed and published in 1867 by the English music-hall writer/manager Joseph Bryan Geoghegan (1815–1889)—who, incidentally, had a total of twenty-one children by his wife and mistress. Geoghegan may have borrowed the wild interjection “ahoo” from a blackface-minstrel song.
“Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye” became a huge hit for the star comic singer Harry Liston and was received by generations of audiences in England, Ireland, the United States, and Australia as pure stage-Irish hilarity. Only around 1915, Lighter shows, did a war-sickened audience begin to hear it as anything but fun. The Irish Republican movement adopted it as anti-British propaganda, and protest singers from the 1950s on tinkered with the lyrics to bring out what they saw as its nascent, pacifist rage. The original tune fell by the wayside, and these days it is usually sung to the tune of its 1863 predecessor “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”