Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green

Comment by Wes Merchant on March 8, 2014 at 7:53pm

I thought folks here might enjoy this, since the song came up.

Comment by Bob Sayers on March 8, 2014 at 8:26pm

That's "Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green, or The Broken-Hearted Milkman" by British music hall performer Harry Clifton.  It was first published in 1864 and was popular all around the English-speaking world, even in the Yokohama colony in Japan.  Here's the American sheet music cover:

Comment by Bob Sayers on March 9, 2014 at 12:07am

Wes, I meant to say thanks for posting that awesome video of Nigel Leach.  I'd never seen it before, although I knew the song from some research I've been doing on the foreign community in Yokohama, Japan in the 1860s.  I now have a much better understanding of what a 19th-century music hall performance might have looked like.       

Comment by Paul Draper on March 9, 2014 at 8:46am

Thank you for that blast from the past!  When my parents returned from a trip to England back in the '70s, they brought back a recording of this song.  The singer on the recording (don't know who) was accompanied by a banjo.  Believe it or not that was one of my earliest inspirations to learn the banjo!  (I never learned the song tho...)

Comment by Wes Merchant on March 9, 2014 at 8:47am

That video of Carl's brought this to mind. Here's a setting from Sydney Ryan's "True Violinist ', 1872, Cincinnati.

Comment by Paul Draper on March 9, 2014 at 8:51am

Thanks Wes.  I owe it to myself to learn it.

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