Description

Michael Joseph 1st 1984
large 4to, v v min bmps to bds, v v min crsing + chps to d/w o/w VG++/VG++ 1550 gms
(Order reference 5929).

There are some songs which just ask to be sung. Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer, do! is an irresistibly catchy chorus. Almost everyone can join in After the ball is over or swing to the lilting melody of She is my Lily of Laguna. Most people recognize such heroines of the popular stage as Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green or Oh! Susanna, and know heroes like The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. And surely everyone can summon up a folk memory or two with those stalwarts of land and sea, Good-bye Dolly Gray and Rule Britannia. All these songs were written a century or more ago, and yet they are still as bright and compulsively singable as they were at the height of the Victorian era.

This unique and delightful songbook brings together the most popular of the old favourites, songs that sent a whole generation of men and women flocking to the music halls and entertained them at home round the family piano. The book, compiled and presented by modern music hall artistes, is meant to be used. Each song is reproduced from original Victorian songsheets, with piano accompaniment and words large enough to be read by a fair-sized gathering behind the piano stool; each page is illustrated and decorated in the elaborate graphic style so beloved of the Victorians; and the whole collection of 60 songs, beautifully printed and finished with a register ribbon, is sewn and bound so that it will stay open in use and last through many a raucous sing-song.

With more than 250 photographs, engravings, paintings and other period illustrations and a full accompanying text, The Illustrated Victorian Songbook also paints in the social background, the pubs, the seamy song and supper rooms, the society drawing rooms, the gaslit music halls and the rival temperance coffee houses where the songs were sung, introduces star artistes like Marie Lloyd, Albert Chevalier and the Christy Minstrels and revives in all its charm and vitality the first great age of popular entertainment.