Pop songs are just like pop singers. If they want to become really, really big, they have to be prepared to take a lot of abuse. A song which becomes popular has to deal with critics who find it shallow, derivative, and overly simple (which some critics feel are basic requirements for even being a popular song), listeners who find it annoying, extremely bad singers who do their own versions, and, of course, the song parodists, from skilled comedians to the kids on the playground who can find a bedroom or bathroom theme in any song that ever existed. (I recall fights on the playground over the Winston cigarette jingle parody, of which there were two competing versions: one in which the singer smokes “cotton-picking paper” and one involving “dirty toilet paper”, the latter being a parody of a parody.)
And then there are the cartoonists, postcard or otherwise, always willing to exploit the public’s familiarity with a tune. (HOW many cartoons did I see in the day of Frankenstein’s monster and a detached body part with the caption “I Want To Hold Your Hand”? For a few years…oh, yes, that was a song. Look it up under ancient history.) The pop song didn’t have to be a current hit, as seen in these ironic interpretations of “Home, Sweet Home”, a song loved and parodied. The fact that the author of this immortal hymn to home was single, and never owned a home, was not lost of postcard publishers, either.
But we can’t spend an entire blog on John Howard Payne’s creation. There are songs which could use more attention, having passed from the peak of their former popularity into obscurity. Annie Moore was a celebrity of sorts in her day, the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island, but it was her name, not her story, which attracted a songwriter, who wrote that we’d never see “Sweet Annie, sweet Annie any more.” We ignore both story and song for this picture, though.
Here we have an example of applying a title to a picture which COULD logically fit the line but doesn’t. The original was a lovelorn song, not at all involving Hubby’s late hours.
At least these folks ARE being “rocked in the cradle of the deep”, though they are hardly laying themselves down in peace to sleep. The original hymn (a good seventy years old by the time this card was published) WAS asking for God to watch over someone’s rest and safety at sea, so perhaps this isn’t as far from the original as that last example.
On the other hand, this hymn had nothing to do with railroad tracks, rails or ties.
This postcard keeps a little of the philosophy of the original, but switches the roles. This early twentieth century hit, which spawned a LOT of movie dialogue, was a bachelor’s song about how great is was to live alone, so you can eat and drink whenever you want. To judge by their facial expressions, this bachelor is completely surprised by someone who wants what SHE wants when she wants it.
While this one, and half a dozen like it, keeps only the title and changes the subject. We have spoken of Bert Williams, and how so many of his hit songs were swiped for postcards. If you recall, this was a song about financial troubles, NOT about the problems of the seasick. (Nor, as mentioned hereintofore, the processes of the laxative company which swiped the song for its advertising.)
And let us finish with another song that launched a thousand postcards. I would guess, though I have not seen enough to prove it, that some postcard cartoonist, as some time or another, has depicted just about anything the can be done in the shade of an old apple tree being done there (even if sometimes the tree trunk…well, that’s a whole nother blog, really.)
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