My Old Man by John Major

Author:John Major
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

* There may have been subliminal reasons for this. Rumours persisted that Payne was a womaniser. One story referred to a pregnant chorus girl. ‘’Ad any pain?’ asks a friend, and the girl replies, ‘Certainly not! It’s my boyfriend’s!’ But this may simply have been malice, as I can find no firm corroboration for such stories.

14

Warp and Weft

‘I’m performing because I really want, not because I have to bring bread back home.’

YO-YO MA, CELLIST (B.1955­)

The stories of George Leybourne, Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd and Harry Lauder resonate down the years and dominate the history of music hall. But music hall was far more than the superstars. Some long-forgotten names, known in the business as ‘wines and spirits’,* would have played at the very foot of the bill from Bristol to Inverness, scraping a living in dreary halls and lodging in squalid digs.

Between the stars and the ‘wines and spirits’ there was a broad range of artistes who, while not as well known as the top echelon of performers, were hugely popular with audiences. Often multi-talented, they filled theatres all around the country and were the ‘warp and weft’ of the music hall loom. Among them are some who left lasting memories – and, in the case of Harry Clifton, expressions and sentiments still in everyday use 140 years after his death.

‘Handsome’ Harry Clifton was the master of the ‘motto song’† and self-proclaimed author of five hundred songs in all, despite his early death at the age of only forty-eight. Clifton’s approach to song authorship was pragmatic, and the originality of some of his songs is dubious. Writing in 1946, Theodore Felstead was scathing: ‘He wrote the words himself – frequently nothing but gross plagiarism of a well known ditty – and had them set to music by a hack composer. Sometimes he didn’t even bother to do that; he merely utilised some favourite traditional air and made his “lyric” fit in.’ As Clifton was sometimes an ‘improvisatore’, composing songs on the spot, this unkind criticism may be justified. Felstead compared one of Clifton’s big hits, ‘Work Boys, Work and be Contented’, with the strikingly similar American Civil War anthem ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching’. Another Clifton song, ‘A Motto for Every Man’, was set to an existing waltz, ‘The Corn Flower Waltz’, written by his publisher Charles Coote. Clifton was unabashed by criticism. He placed an advertisement in the Sun in July 1867 which read: ‘Each of the songs are entirely his own composition, both word and music … unaided he has worked against the popular taste.’ After Clifton’s death in 1872, Coote observed that he himself wrote a number of Clifton’s songs, and others were collaborative efforts.

Whatever their origins, Clifton’s songs are still familiar to us today, and some of their lyrics have passed into the language: ‘Paddle Your Own Canoe’, ‘Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel is a Motto for Every Man’, ‘Up With the Lark in the Morning’, ‘Where There’s a Will There’s a Way’ and ‘Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green’.

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