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Ian Pace
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« Reply #20 on: 13:19:06, 17-06-2008 » |
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The refrain is the passage from 'When you're grown up laddie'.
Re that Marie Lloyd song, I found something interesting in a book:
The sexual image of the soldier is a persistent element in music-hall song. Winks, clandestine encounters in parks, the appeal of a uniform or military moustache, are invariably part of the sexual code. There is also an occasional element of sexual blackmail, especially during the 1914-18 war. This was most rife in recruitment posters. For example, a poster, now in the Imperial War Museum, portrays two women and a child staring from a window at a group of marching soldiers and carries the slogan: 'WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY - GO!' The influence of the well known 'Lord Kitchener Wants You' poster, in which the direct visual confronation of Kitchener's face, as the personification of single-minded power, both accuses and demands a response. It is visual blackmail. Woman as temptress and accuser was clearly believed to have a pervasive influence upon would-be recruits. This was also the case much earlier, both before and during the Boer War. Music-hall songs appeared which suggested that failure to enlist denoted a loss of sexual identity, whilst to enlist was sexually enhacing. Marie Lloyd's single patriotic song epitomizes this:
One I though yer meant to grow a Derby curl,
But they cut it orf and shoved it on your chest.
I do feel proud of you, I do honour bright,
I'm going to give you an extra cuddle to-night,
I didn't think much of you, till you joined the army, John,
But I do like you, cocky, now you've got yer khaki on.
The association of non-enlistment with effeminacy, the promise of sexual favours and the appeal of a uniform are all implicit in the words, yet Marie Lloyd's biographer, Naomi Jacobs, insists that the popular appeal lay in the persona of the performer. Jacobs states that Marie Lloyd was supremely uninterested in strident patriotism, but used the song to create the character of a 'coster woman...a fine, buxom East End wench...'. It is possible that what the audience responded to was a fantasy of Marie Lloyd becoming temporarily available to them and the pleasure of this lay in the more suggestive words, rather than in the sentiment of patriotism. Clearly, the song as performance was heightened by the fact that during it, Marie Lloyd danced on stage with a man in uniform. Jacob's insistence upon character creation does not take into account the fact that the audience would also be very aware that this was Marie Lloyd, the music-hall star performing.
Nicholas Daly, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds, pp. 24-25.
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« Last Edit: 13:30:29, 17-06-2008 by Ian Pace »
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Logged
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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