Unsung Heroes

   I cannot offer any explanation for WHY you sometimes find yourself humming certain songs.  A phrase or a word may trigger the memory, or that background music at the grocery store, hardly noticed while you’re picking up an emergency supply of potato chips, may resurface later.  Nor can I explain why certain songs are more likely to come to your mind more readily than others.  I have enough trouble tidying my own brain to concern myself with yours.

   But I can tell you where some of the songs came from, supplying you with some well-worn trivia to xc consider while you try to stop humming any of the following.

   According to legend, it is the first song ever to be recorded so you could hear it only when the record was played backward.  It is a song which in the United States screams “Christmas is coming!’ and is believed to be the first Christmas song ever recorded, though it does not mention Christmas at all, and was written in a hurry just to make a quick buck.

   But “Jingle Bells”, composed around 1856, got James lord Pierpont elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame.  Pierpont spent the 1850s writing chirpy pop songs which did okay, but they didn’t make feeding his family easy, so he dashed off a little thing he published as “The One Horse Open Sleigh”.  It took off, being republished over and over, leaving him and his family after him fighting hard to keep his name on it.  Other songs of his are still listenable, I am told, but only this quickie became immortal.

   Arthur de Lull, on the other hand, wrote only one song.  But what a song.  She was sixteen (her real name was Euphemia Allen) when she wrote a little novelty piano number for her brother’s publishing company, a simple piece where the player put her hands palm to palm and played the song just with her little fingers, performing a sort of chopping motion, hence the name “The Chop Waltz”.   For reasons not thoroughly known, this 1877 piece was renamed “Chopsticks” and was heard round the world in no time, inspiring variations and complications.  (It also has its Christmas associations, inspired when someone realized you could simply sing the words “Merry Christmas” to the notes as they bounced along.)

   Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser, together and individually, were responsible for a LOT of numbers in what people call The Great American Songbook, starting with Stardust and exploding in all directions.  You may find yourself humming any one of their dozens of classics.  But, um, it is apparently due to a man named Robert Schultz that one of their songs can be heard wherever two or more young people are gathered near a piano.  I have heard toddlers perform this song on YouTube; I heard it dozens of times during my distant youth, in church basements and school music rooms.  Let the authority figures turn their backs on that piano for a moment and….

   Boomp-a-da-da, boomp-a-da-da, boomp-a-da-da, boomp-a-da-da would begin and someone would cry “I know the top part!”  Plink Plink Plink.  Plink Plink kaplink kaplink, Plink Plink….

   “Heart and Soul” debuted on records in 1938, and if you listen to the early versions (at least three of which charted in the first year alone), you can hear hints of the classic arrangement, but not exactly what was pounded out on pianos.  THAT came about because the Robert Schultz Music Company released it as a piano duet for beginning music students.  The duet is credited to Robert Schultz himself, but I am not familiar enough with the company to say whether his was the mind behind the music, or if he was just a CEO who got credit for anything his company published.  I’m not saying he shouldn’t get the blame; I just don’t know if he deserves ALL of it.

   I think we’re about out of room for today, so I will have to hold off on the complex history of Kum-Ba-Ya, the long litigious tale of Happy Birthday to You, the meanderings of The Happy Wanderer, or the folk tradition behind I Love the Mountains (Oh, you remember “Boom-de-ah-dah, boom-de-ah-dah, boom-de-ah-dah”.)

   If I have soured your day by forcing a mindworm melody on you, why, at least I irritated you without having to discuss religion or politics.

Dutch Love

   If you are in the business of selling short sentiments on a regular basis, as postcard publishers once were, the problem quickly arises of how to say exactly what you said last time around, only in a new and interesting way.  (This tendency is why a lot of great writers started out on the sports page of their local newspaper.  New ways to say “Southwest Central; Loses A Close One” will tax the most viid imagination.)

   “Why haven’t you written?”, “When are you coming to visit?”, and “Thinking of You” probably make up nearly half the sentiments of postcards intended as greetings.  “Thinking of You” could run the gamut from “Where’s that five bucks you borrowed last St. patrick’s Day?’ to “I just realized you’re my soulmate.”  This last one, and the variants, has kept Valentine makers in business for decades, and it was the same for the postcard maker.

   The “I Love You” style of card needed special treatment.  There were several questions that needed to be answered when sending one of these.  A) Was the sender positive the recipient was going to feel the same way?  B) Did he or she WANT a card that gushed all over until it was embarrassing, and, most importantly C)How many other people were going to read the card before it fell into the right hands?

   One solution to all three of these was to dilute the message a little by having the sentiment pronounced in a pleasant accent, and another was to have children speaking the lines.  (This led to a number of supposedly lovable cards done in Baby Talk.  If you don’t mind your manners, Corned Beef Lasagna, I’ll post a blog about that some day.)

   And this is where those Dutch kids really come into their own.  By coming onto the stage in their cute hats and cute wooden shoes and speaking out, in their cute way with their cute accent, about every aspect of love and romance, they could cover the whole gamut of the game.  It’s hardly possible to cover them all here, but the Dutch kids can tell us about a good time

Playing the Field

Throwing out one’s line

Responding to someone else’s line

Hitting it off

Devotion

Rapture

Jealousy

The Spat

Missing the Other

The Reunion

Popping the question

And the happy ending

(Note; this is just one lineup of story points frm thousands of Dutch child observations on love: for example, there’s a series with that wooden shoe car where she takes the wheel, pushes him out, and tells him if he can’t keep up with her, that’s all there is to it.  But hey, why not knock off reading dese blogs and go schmooze wit’ de one you love yet?)

Accenting the Positive

   Once upon a time, these United States were a polyglot nation.  In the big cities, sometimes, people who live four blocks from each other couldn’t make out each other’s version of English, while in rural areas, people knew immediately if you had crossed the Mississippi to come to market.  Before the radio networks decided to go for a Midwestern English as the least annoying American tongue, we struggled with each other’s way of talking.

   There has always been a hearty discussion of ethnic accents in pop culture: where they are a symbol of group solidarity and when they are unpleasant satire.  But if one looks at the thousands of different postcards issued between 1908 and 1920 featuring a group of heavily accented youngsters, one realizes there was another reason to exploit a group’s accent: it gave the publisher a new way to say some not very new sentiment.

   Design after design featured one or more Dutch children, clattering into view in their traditional footwear and immediately identifiable hats, speaking a Dutch0accented form of English (somewhat akin to Pennsylvania Dutch, which was derived, ultimately, from German, not Dutch, but precision was not the name of the game.

   I’ve been hunting around for some explanation of why these Dutch children appeared suddenly in the cultural mix, some stage or cinematic version of Hans Brinker, say, or some campaign by Dutch Cleanser (introduced in 1905 by a meat packing company run by an Irishman.)  Nothing quite explains this craze for Dutch children on postcards.

   It isn’t that there were no other ethnic accents used to spice up ideas in the world of postcards.  There was the Irish accent

Or the German accent

   One artist even tried to make a line of cute Italian kids a substitute for the Dutch ones

   And Dutch adults were not left out of the mix

   While some artists went just for the accent

   But somehow the Dutch kids outnumbered them all, providing ammunition for, say, birthday party invitations

   Or holiday greetings

   Though their chief occupation was explaining love and romance, a topic which benefited from having the young and cute explain, and which we can study more in our next thrilling installment.

ARCHAEOLOGY OF HUMOR

            I have to admit that sometimes I don’t understand every facet of every joke thrown at me by the humorists of the past.  I think we can all enjoy the basic humor of this card, for example.  Anyone who played on seesaws (teeter-totters, in my neighborhood) knows that joy of breaking the rules and putting your opposite number in an awkward position.

            But I’m still slightly puzzled.  DID adults play on seesaws a hundred and twenty years ago?  Did young women glory in being this much heavier than their friends?  That gesture she’s making is a classic, too, and not very polite.  DID people become that competitive in the world of major league seesaw?

            (I also wasted a certain amount of time researching the gesture, known as “thumbing the nose” or “Cocking a snook”.  What IS a snook, anyhow?  The gesture goes back to the sixteenth century, based on literary data, but the snook reference only to the early nineteenth century.  The Interwebs defines a snook merely as “a rude gesture”, without noting that it MUST be a NOSE-related gesture, since the word starts with sn, as do so many nose-related terms: snout, sniff, sniffle, snort, etc.  This is the problem with libraries being inaccessible these days.  One is limited to the resources of whatever somebody feels like posting, raising their sneering snouts at what the rest of us may want to…where were we?)

            This pair of postcards has also left me in something of a puzzle.  I GET the general attitude of the card: you’re visiting or working in some area where you’re a newcomer and a rookie, and you’re sending word back home…or something like that.  But what’s so great about the idea that it was good enough for some other postcard maker to swipe?  Were there THAT many people a hundred years ago who wanted to mock themselves as tenderfeet?  Or am I missing something that would be obvious to experts on the era of the 1910s?

            If any such person reads this, they could relieve my mind with a few other jokes as well.  This is a pretty popular joke, which we in our era might call a MacGyver gag.  Somebody takes what material he has on hand and makes a fairly complicated mechanical device from it all.  This fed neatly into what we might call the Irish Problem of the era.  The Irish were still stereotyped as a low-class, illiterate, heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking group, but enough Irish-Americans were rising to positions of power that a salute to their ingenuity (though it was ingenuity with beer kegs) could work.

            But again, what was so good about the joke that other artists used it?  One of these artists obviously took hold of the idea the other had, or they both stole it from the same place.  What was so appealing about a coal-driven beer keg vehicle that it made larceny worthwhile?

            Sometimes it’s just a matter of slang.  I have plunged through the Interwebs several times in search of the exact significance of “Ace High” and came out about as dry as when I jumped in.  Yes, I know it’s a good omen, taken from the world of poker: if you have a straight flush with an ace, you have the best possible hand, “ace high”.  But there was more to it than that.  It had some nuance that I’m missing, probably through being born too late.  (Ever try to explain the phrase “Where’s the beef?” to someone who didn’t see the commercial when it was new?  You’ve got the words, but you can’t recapture the music.)

            This card is described as a picture of a suffragette by some sellers.  I have hunted high and low for some use of this phrase by a suffragette, to no avail.  You can see the other half of the joke: she’s standing on top of a cylinder recording—standing on her “record”.  (Side question: when did we start calling recordings records?)  But what does it mean that she’s standing on it Ace High?  A piece of the puzzle is still missing.

            (No, you can see she didn’t do THAT joke.  If she had, I’d be saving this card for my “How Did They Get Away With That?” blog.)

There Was an Old Postcard

There was an old postcard with dents which its owner threw over the fence; It was drenched by the rain ’til she found it again (I sold it for thirty-nine cents.)

No hope for it.  This week has turned out to be a salute to postcards which rhyme, and we must face the 77,557-pound gorilla in the room.  Anyway, it’s close to St. Patrick’;s Day, so perhaps it is not a bad time to consider the limerick.

If you have read the blogs of my pre-pandemic life, you may have read the one on May 29, 2020, in which I celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of a small collection of small poems called The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, the first collection of limericks.  It was intended for children, and was one of those rare little books which tried simply to amuse them, without teaching any big lessons (and, um, without a lot of big laughs, either.  (There was an old woman in Spain, to be  civil went much ‘gainst her grain, Yet she danced a fandango with General Fernando, that whimsical woman of Spain.)

For those who don’t know (and there are plenty, to judge by the listings online), a limerick is a poem with five lines: Two long ones of more or less seven syllables, two short ones around five syllables, and then a capper with seven.  The first, second, and fifth lines rhyme with each other, while the third and fourth rhyme to themselves.  The fashion of having the last line repeat the first has largely died away, and whether the punch line is REQUIRED to be obscene is still a matter of some debate.

In any case, this made the limerick short enough to fit on a postcard, and it caught on quickly.  A very popular series of the early twentieth century, later imitated by Mad Magazine and Playboy, picked out a certain type of person and summed them up in a quick limerick, as with the actress.

This was in the days, you understand, when a person could make herself famous with bleached blonde hair and a fetching wriggle of the body.  This was a long time ago, of course.   Also easily parodied this way were the mother-in-law, the golfer, the lawyer, or the tenor.

This particular series, with its detailed caricatures, led imitators to take a try, as in this rival firm’s salute to the hatmaker.

Racier poems did proliferate, but companies tended to produce these at first as arcade cards, cards the same size and shape as postcards which were not sold to be sent through the mails, but were available in vending machines at penny arcades.  After World War II, postal authorities loosened up a bit, and the Bamforth folks (who are a whole nother blog) were able to tell us of the lady named Sally who stripped for the boys at the Palais, and of course the young Scotsman named Sandy who stopped at the pub for a shandy.

But in the…  (Oh, very well.  “She drew great applause when she took off her draws for the hair on her head didn’t tally” and “He lifted his kilt to see what he’d spilt and the barmaid said “Ooh, that’s a dandy!”  Don’t tell your parents where you learned these.)

Artists of an earlier era had to make do with what could be safely sent through the mails.  Which did not prevent them making a killing point from time to time.

Even Verse

   I had not intended to spend a week considering postcard verse.  As far as I know, no poets who got their start ever won a Nobel prize for Literature, and there’s a reason for that.

    Still, it served its purpose: many the postcard was sent where we would now send a greeting card, and how many of us read the verse inside before our eyes turn down to see that it’s from Aunt Booney (thank heaven she sent a card and not a box of her rum balls this year.  Last year four bomb-sniffing dogs with the postal Service keeled over from the fumes.  What did the poem inside the card say?  I forget.)

    One of the most common sentiments expressed on postcards was a variant of “Thinking of You”, only with an edge.  This was an age of literate amusements, and “You owe me a letter” is the message of many a postcard, like the one above.  It’s like a cute little baby scorpion: short and sweet with a sting in its tail.  One could express the same thought in a less pushy way.

    The same message, combining “Thinking of You” with a more overt “Missing You”, is shown in this card, which has me slightly confused.

    Is the sender promising never to shake you off as a friend, or promising that no matter what dumb things you say, you won’t be grabbed by the shoulders and shaken?  I’m also a little worried by “Best Wishes”.

    I suppose you could send a group greeting to a whole family.  It doesn’t HAVE to be a card you sent to your harem.  I’ll worry about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.

    Speaking of which, the postcard verse could also be used to teach you a thing or two, to remind you of important precepts and encourage you to look around you with wonder and optimism and all that other supposedly infallible fuel.  Take Day By Day, for example.

    I think I’d rather use those crumbs to scatter and hope to draw in a bluebird of happiness, but that would have made a longer poem.

    Valentines and romantic poems are easier.  You generally know what the writer is aiming for, even if it does make it sound like the object of your affection is a rare collectible.

    We’re on firmer ground when we come to the humorous poem.  There’s not a whole lot of mystery in, say, a tribute to one of the storekeepers in your neighborhood.

    Nor is there any mystery to this classic, which was hopping about in vaudeville before postcards were invented.  (And may well have been recited by jesters before vaudeville was invented.)

    But even here there are bewildering poetic passages.  I understand the story here and I love Miss French on her postcard.  But I have a feeling she would have been a handful in real life.

Making It Verse

            Having spent a week wandering down Tin Pan Alley, examining the songs of the past and the usdes and abuses applied to them, we may have forgotten that there were plenty of other sources of inspiration being offered to the postcard artist.  It was one of the golden eras of Memorized Poetry, when good and useful verses were pushed into the heads of schoolchildren, either in an effort to provide them with guidance in their future lives or to give them something they could recite and convince parents that all that money spent on schools had a visible result.

            So the postcard artist had a whole fund of verses to draw on that the audience would be bound to have heard in class, whether they were forced to learn it themselves or to listen as their classmates recited it.

            The little verse above is particularly piquant in this connection, for it is based on a poem that was ad-libbed in ten minutes in class.  Young Julia was challenged to go up to the blackboard and improvise a bit of verse, and wrote “Little drops of water, little grains of sand, Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.”  With additions, it became a smash hit for class recitations and, with music, a standard of the Methodist hymnal.

            The illustration here has nothing to do with what the poet was thinking, but I can’t say the same for the minds of the children who had to listen to it.  One of the whole points of a poem parody is to turn the original thought into something quite different.

            One could do this by rewriting the verse, or simply by providing an illustration which twisted the original meaning.  During Prohibition, after all, one of the most famous lines from Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner took on new meaning.

            The poems parodied didn’t have to be gold-lined, certified classics.  I have not been able to track down on the Interwebs who came up with the once-popular wedding toast/anniversary toast/Valentine verse which ran “Here’s to the wings of love; May they never lose a feather, But soar up to the sky above and last and last forever.”  It’s a perfectly acceptable bit of occasional poetry, especially if you recite it too fast for anyone to object to rhyming “forever” with “feather”.

            But somebody noticed the near-rhyme and decided to supply something a little better.

            Maybe it was the improved rhyme, maybe it was the more specific image invoked, but whoever came up with this version actually produced something that was to be remembered at least as long as the original, and would be exploited by other artists as years went by.

            I have written elsewhere about The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and its impact on the reading public over the years.  The most-quoted line of that work found its way into Western culture, most memorably in the man who paid off his debts with a check, a bottle of Sauvignon, and a freshly baked baguette.

            The recipient admitted he was grateful to get back to thousand dollars he’d leant, but inquired what the rest had to do with it.  “Why,” said his friend, “That’s a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a thou.”

            We will speak another time of the use of the accent in turn of the century humor, and how it may not have been the unmitigated insult so many critics of today consider it.  But this heavily accented version of Omar’s sentiment seems to embody, under the thick lingo, a certain sincerity.

            Of course, the sender’s sentiment has to be considered.  This later version is quicker, cheaper, and has no accent, and yet perhaps it came just as much from the heart.

One of Those Songs, Part Three

To conclude this week’s investigation of popular music and the postcard, I thought I would collect a few stories I came up with on my way to somewhere else.

We opened, above, with another comic postcard by travel photographer J. Murray Jordan.  This represents a hit song-Come Away With Me, Lucille, In My Merry Oldsmobile—and chooses, in this artist’s way, the raciest part of the song, that Lucille can “go as far as you like with me”.  Coming out in 1905, the song was written without the knowledge of the Oldsmobile people, who were so thrilled with the free advertising, the story goes, that they gave the composer and lyricist a free car.  The men pointed out that there were, after all, two of them, and two cars….  This did not go over and, again according to legend,. They retaliated by writing a song called Take Me Back in Your Cadillac, about Lucille getting disgusted with the way the Oldsmobile kept breaking down.  Cadillac was in talks with Oldsmobile at the time, however, and declined the honor of a song.

The era of the romantic Irish song, which coincided with a period when the Irish were one of the most reviled ethnic groups in America, overlapped into the golden age of the postcard, and there were plenty of Irish tenors professing their love on cards, especially those by Theochrom, a company which specialized in song lyric cards.  (More of them anon.)  What interested me about these is how many of these heroes were named barney…because it would rhyme with Killarney.

            This is an alarming photo, which raises the question “Why would you send a card with this picture on it to anybody?”  Behind its implied violence, however, waits a comic song which somehow lasted generations (The Interwebs finds it being sung in an early animated cartoon of 1930, an episode of I Love Lucy in the 60s, and an episode of MASH a generation after that.)

“I’m Afraid to Come Home in the Dark” was a hit for Billy Murray (who sang virtually every comic song of that decade) in 1908.  It is the explanation by a young husband about why he keeps coming home at dawn.  What with all the dangers of the big city, he was afraid to leave (the bar) until daylight was on its way.  He gets his comeuppance at the end of the song, when his wife comes home around NOON and sings the chorus to him.

It gave all manner of ideas to cartoonists.

The Theochrom postcards were the work of Theodor Eismann’s company (the “chrom” indicates the cards were colored) and his Song Series is easily recognizable by the gilded proscenium arch around his scenes.  I’m ridiculously proud of this one, because the lyrics to the song are, in fact, presented incorrectly here.  I’m guessing that could be because he couldn’t get the rights to the actual song, and just put down something close enough to them to pass without infringing copyright.

            A hit song of 1906 (we once had this sheet music for sale at the Book Fair, and I wonder how much this cover had to do with the sales) it tells the tale of a lonesome cowboy who is trying to convince his girlfriend (Shy Ann) to come with him to the big city (Cheyenne) and get married.

            It was more than a hit: it became background music for pianists to play during silent movies, it became background music in early westerns and in western-themed animated cartoons, and it is, in fact, one of those songs you have probably heard dozens of times without ever knowing it had a name.

            If you want to talk longevity, however, let us consider the song “Row, Row, Row”, a mildly scandalous pop song of 1912.  Not to be confused with Row Row Row Your Boat, this tells the tale of Johnny O’Connor who liked to take “girlies” out on his boat, which he would row row row when he wasn’t fooling around (to quote the song again.)

            Featured in the Ziegfeld Follies, it had a way of turning up in movies for decades afterward, and was sung by Wayne and Wanda on The Muppet Show.  But it isn’t the song I wanted to salute here.  It’s the joke.  This is hardly the first postcard (and definitely not the last) to feature a man trying to take his, um, curvaceous girlfriend out on the lake.  Putting the heavy lady in the boat so the man with the oars was left high and dry in the air would be a hit in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s…any cartoonist who didn’t know what else to do, particularly if turning out postcards for vacationing couples, would produce spiritual descendants of this couple.

            I suppose saying the humor was a little heavy-handed would be anatomically incorrect.

One of Those Songs, Part Two

As you may recall from our last thrilling episode (if not, see above) we are considering the various ways postcard humorists made use of popular songs, whether these were destined to become classics or swept under the rug with the dust of a previous generation’s joys.

Old reliable songs were, of course, fair game.  Everybody knew, for example, “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye”, and songs like this were all over the place.  Sometimes these expressions would be reverent

And at other times one just went for the gag.

And, in case you think they missed the other possible joke, here it is.

Similarly, a sweet little lullaby (this one from a previous generation, by Stephen Foster) had its obvious comic overtones.

But current pop music was where the iron was hot, where postcard companies wanted to jump into the fad wagon while it was still rolling.  The song didn’t have to be, by its nature, a funny one to be taken advantage of.  Dozens of artists tried their hand at “I’d Leave My happy Home For You”, a song about a young woman who falls in love with an impresario and heads off with him to pursue a career on the stage, only to be abandoned when the show goes bust in a distant city and her hero skips town without her.  Just that title was fodder for any number of themes.

A good, solid hit novelty tune was the best target.  The purchaser of a card based on a current humorous song could, with the expenditure of merely a penny, imply a) I know this song, too  b) I am just such a humorous jocular fellow, and c) I have friends (like you) who are just as up to date as I am.

Let us consider a long-running song by Jean Havez, a man who wrote comedy songs for, among others, Bert Williams (mentioned in Monday’s column) and went on to write silent movie comedies.  In a little number called “Everybody Works But Father”, he produced a song fondly remembered by vaudevillians for eons. It was funny enough that a literal presentation of the lyrics was all that was really necessary.

That postcard sums up the basic plot of the song.  Father, having determined he had plenty of family members who could do useful work, now sits in front of the fireplace, smoking his pipe of clay.  That “pipe of clay” could be taken as a jab at any one of a number of ethnic groups (pipes of clay being cheap, and used back in the old country by among others, the Dutch, the Irish, the Germans, the English….)  Therein lay one of its glories: whatever ethnic character you played on stage, the song fit.  EVERYBODY had a lazy relative (which the sequel song “Uncle Quit Work, Too” made us of.)  Groucho Marx included the song in his repertoire for years, still performing it on TV talk shows when the rest of the world had forgotten it.

And, of course, it was ripe for any kind of parody.  Several people wrote sequels, which one may or may not consider as a happy ending.

I don’t know about this ending, myself: everybody’s well-dressed but Father. Happy for whom? The original song, however, also played right into the popular theme of fathers dealing with fussy babies at midnight.

Perhaps it would be more comfortable to close considering a parody of another song, appropriated here to suggest that Father and Mother might live happily ever after, after all.

One of Those Songs, Part One

Pop Music was defined by one wise man as the music your father listens to.  What YOU listen to is REAL music, not popular stuff, and the songs you find yourself humming are songs that will live forever and not disappear into the mass of forgotten “pop” music.  Yeah, we’re always kidding ourselves about these things.  Eventually, all we have left is our ability to say to a rising generation, “Yeah, just wait ‘til it’s YOUR turn to get ignored!”  (P.S.  They aren’t listening.)

Now, a few songs will roll along for generations.  “In the Shade of the old Apple Tree” hit the pop charts in 1905, and was immediately recorded by everyone.  One of the few romantic songs written in the form of a series of limericks,, it was catchy enough to encourage jazz versions in the thirties, and sentimental versions for a generation after that.  It was probably also in the back of the mind of the writers of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else but Me”, setting off another series of recordings.

There were also parodies and, of course, a postcard jibe or two, as seen above, where a young man is pouting because all he’s finding in the shade of the old apple tree is apples.

Other songs, equally big hits at their inception, made more modest splashes.  Mr. Moon Man was a reply song to Shine On, harvest Moon.  The hero of Shine On has a girlfriend who is so terrified of the dark that she will only go out with him if the moon is bright.  As it has been a rough year for weather, he begs the harvest Moon to stay bright.  In the sequel, the moon is now asked to switch off, as “Two is company and three’s a crowd.”  It was a big success in the hands of Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes, but it did not last as long as its predecessor, even when posted with these cousins of the Campbell Soup Kids.

(These kids were drawn by the artist responsible for Campbell’s trademark children, Grace Drayton, but at this point in her life she had not yet married Mr. Drayton, so that signature down there is R. Wiederseim.)

And this, nice though the card is, is a pop song that was swallowed by obscurity almost immediately.  Yes, maybe you have heard a country chorus singing “Keep on the Sunny Side”, but this is a later song with the same title and different lyrics.  It couldn’t keep up.

One of the oddest fates for any pop song hit was probably suffered by “All Going Out and Nothing Coming In”, which was a hit for Bert Williams.  In his day the best-paid comedian on Broadway, and possibly the best comedian of his day (even other comedians said so.  W.C. Fields, not known for generous praise, called him “the funniest man I ever saw.”)

His stage character was a slow-moving, often depressed, usually penniless individual.  One song that described his financial situation was recorded by him in 1901, “All Going Out and Nothing Coming In”.  It’s basically a description of the difference in your friends and family when your cash is running low.

It was a big hit, especially with postcard publishers, who thought of another application of the lyrics immediately.

The joke was popular enough to be repeated by other cartoonists, since it’s hard to copyright a specific gag (so to speak.)

But then it was picked up as an advertising slogan, one of the things many songwriters hope for.  A popular chocolate flavored product which had been around since 1894, Cascarets was selling millions of boxes of their tasty but violent laxative tablets.  See, the song…yeah, you figured it out. Cascarets issued tokens of its Laxative Angel and the slogan, but did not, so far, as I’ve seen, immortalize it on postcards.