Music-Hall Songs

Mr. William Archer contributes to the Fortnightly an attack on the music-hall. He says that it is the home of vulgarity and inanity; that the audiences, as a rule, would enjoy much better stuff than they are given; and that “the music-hall seems to have killed a genuine vein of lyric faculty in the English people.” With all that I don’t think that any one but a poseur could disagree. Mr. Archer makes an extraordinary slip when he puts forward Sally in our Alley as a folk-product of which neither the composer nor the author is known to fame: both words and music being by Henry Carey, who was scarcely an obscure person in his day and is not entirely forgotten now. He concludes, too, with a somewhat vague suggestion of a remedy which has no bearing whatever upon the improvement of music-hall songs, and which one suspects to spring from his perennial desire to induce the public to go and see Ibsen. But his case as a whole is irrefutable. The nation’s songs since the industrial revolution have been immeasurably worse than at any other time in its history. They are almost all commercial products manufactured by half-wits.

Mr. Archer’s case being so sound, it is all the more a pity that he overdoes it. It is true that almost all these songs are vile rubbish, and that the songs of the Villikins and his Dinah and Champagne Charlie periods were even more fatuous than those of the present day. But it is exaggeration to say that

“what is certain is that the whole music-hall movement has produced not one—literally not one—piece of verse that can rank as poetry of the humblest type, or even as a really clever bit of comic rhyming,”

for such songs turn up fairly frequently. Possibly Mr. Archer’s horror of the “red-nosed comedian” prevents him from ever listening to his words: certainly one gets from Mr. Archer’s article the impression that the critic is only acquainted with a few of the most famous of music-halls songs. But although I heartily support his general case and would willingly consent to the execution of all music-hall managers and versifiers and most music-hall artists, I must protest that “really clever bits of comic rhyming” do turn up occasionally.

I wish I had a better verbal memory. But I can at least refer Mr. Archer to a few songs of which, if he cares to spend a month in the Museum with old volumes of Francis, Day and Hunter’s song-books and other collections, he can find the full words. For instance, there is Mr. Harry Lauder’s It’s Nice to get up in the Morning. As I remember them (and here and elsewhere I don’t guarantee that my quotations are literally accurate) the words of the chorus are:

Of course the tune helped it. But it is quite well turned and it springs clean out of popular experience. It is folk-poetry even if the folk didn’t write it. It is not the folk-poetry of the seventeenth century, but it is distinctly the folk-poetry of modern commercial and urban England. We sat upon the Baby on the Shore I’m not sure about; it didn’t, I suspect, have a music-hall origin, though I do not know. But A Little Bit off the Top was quite comic in places; so were The Four Horse Charabanc, Right in the Middle of the Road, Whitewash, and ’E dunno where ’e are. I wish I could recall the words of the song which had a chorus beginning:

but even that high-spirited couplet shows their quality. These mock-tragic songs are often quite good. The best known was His Day’s Work was done, which was undeniably a comic conception well carried out. Did Mr. Archer ever hear If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between? The one fragment that sticks in my mind both dates it and shows that it was a “clever bit of comic rhyming”:

And what about Waiting at the Church?—

That seems to me a well-calculated chorus, and the clinch of the last two lines couldn’t be beaten. But perhaps the austere Mr. Archer would think it debasing on the grounds that it led the audience to think lightly of bigamy.

Bigamy is one of the chief comic-song subjects. Vermin in one’s bed, drunkenness, and the food in boarding-houses are the others. The “booze” songs are not, as a rule, as good as they should be. The only one I remember that was at all neat ran something like:

I certainly don’t suggest that any of the songs I have quoted—and I’m certain that consultation with a few expert friends, now in Flanders, would bring better ones to light—are masterpieces. But I do think they are quite comic verse, and that if all music-hall songs were as well turned there would not be much ground for complaint. One does, that is, laugh occasionally at a music-hall, in spite of Mr. Archer. But, unhappily, of ninety-nine songs out of a hundred the words are too abysmal for anything, and the serious ones are almost invariably imbecile. I wonder, by the way, whether the music-hall authorities ever try to induce competent comic rhymers, known in other spheres, to turn out songs for them? Probably not; they think the words don’t matter. That they are mistaken (though the tunes count for most) is shown by the way that a song with good words succeeds with the audience. Even one ingenious line will often bring the house down. I remember the old song I can’t change it. There was a stanza about a bride who appalled her bridegroom by taking herself to pieces, removing a wig, a glass eye, a wooden arm, two wooden legs, etc. In the chorus the narrator suddenly described her as “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree,” and this admirable if unrefined trope was the most successful thing of the year. But as I say, I largely agree with Mr. Archer. If only they would let me smoke in theatres I would never go near a music-hall again until the programmes were improved, and I imagine many other people are in the same boat.