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Source: London Labour and the London Poor Henry Mayhew (1861) Of Long Song-SellersLong songs first appeared between nine and ten years ago. The long-song sellers did depend on the veritable cheapness and novel form in which they vended popular songs, printed on paper, three songs abreast, and the paper was about a yard long, which constituted the three yards of song. Sometimes three slips were pasted together. The vendors paraded the streets with their three yards of new and popular songs for a penny. The songs are, or were, generally fixed to the top of a long pole, and the vendor cried the different titles as he went along. This branch of the profession is confined solely to the summer; it being impossible to exhibit the three yards in wet or foggy weather. The paper songs, as they fluttered from a pole, looked at a little distance like huge much-soiled white ribbons, used as streamers to celebrate some auspicious news. The cry of one man, in a sort of recitative, or, as I heard it called by street-patterers, sing-song, was, Three yards a penny! Three yards a penny! Beautiful songs! Newest songs! Popular Songs! Three yards a penny! Song, song, songs! Others, however, were generally content to announce merely Three yards a penny!The crying of the titles was not done with any other design than that of expressing the great number of songs purchasable for the small charge of one penny. One man told me that he had cried the following songs in his three yards, and he believed in something like the following order: I sometimes began, he said, with singing, or trying to sing, for I'm no vocalist, the first few words of any song, and them quite loud. I'd begin The Pope he leads a happy life, He knows no care - `Buffalo gals, come out to-night;' `Death of Nelson;' `The gay cavalier;' `Jim along Josey;' `There's a good time coming;' `Drink to me only;' `Kate Kearney;' `Chuckaroo-choo, choo-choo-choot-lah;' `Chockala-roony-ninkaping-nang;' `Paga-daway-dusty-kanty-key;' `Hottypie-gunnypo-china-coo' (that's a Chinese song, sir); `I dreamed that I dwelt in marble halls;' `The standard bearer;' `Just like love;' `Whistle o'er the lave o't;' `Widow Mackree;' `I've been roaming;' `Oh! that kiss;' `The old English gentleman,' &c., &c. &c. I dares say they was all in the three yards, or was once, and if they wasn't there was others as good. The chief purchasers of the long songs were boys and girls who expended 1d. or ?d. for the curiosity and novelty of the thing, as the songs were not in the most readable form. Very few were sold in the public-houses, as the vendors scrupled to expose them there, for drunken fellows would snatch them, and make belts of them for a lark. |