Australian Masculinities and Popular Song: The Songs of Sentimental Blokes 1900–1930s

Abstract

Songs in which male protagonists expressed tender sentiments about mothers or sweethearts were everywhere in early twentieth-century Australia. They could be heard in vaudeville shows, home sing-songs, neighbourhood parties and amateur concerts—even those held for or by servicemen during the First World War. In this article I explore the implications of this for Australian masculinities between 1900 and the 1930s, paying particular attention to ‘rough’ and/or working-class masculinities in the First World War era. Drawing on oral histories and a case-study of the vaudevillian, Harry Clay, I challenge the idea that Australians had ‘lost their taste for the sentimental’ in the early 1900s. While men were coming under increasing pressure to be stoic or tough I argue that this made sentimental songs more important rather than less, as a forum in which men could voice feelings considered unacceptable at other times in their lives.

Notes

¹Clay Djubal, ‘What Oh Tonight: The Methodology Factor and Pre-1930s Variety Theatre’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 2005), chap. 5.

²Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788 (Melbourne: Longman, 1995), 69, 176.

³June Howard, ‘What is Sentimentality?’, American Literary History, 11, no. 1 (1999): 76–7.

⁴On Victorian ‘motherlove’ see: Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

⁵See Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis, eds, Boys Don't Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Mary Chapman and Glenn Handler, eds, Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

⁶See John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 48–9 and chap. 9.

⁷Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket (Rahway: John Day, 1930), chaps. 4 and 5.

⁸Lea Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–2.

⁹Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1975), chap. 1; Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 16. See also Stearns’ argument that Victorian forms of emotional expression were contested in the early 1900s, and that a new emphasis on stoical ‘cool’ and detachment prevailed by the 1920s: Stearns, American Cool.

¹⁰Stephen Garton, ‘The Scales of Suffering: Love, Death and Victorian Masculinity’, Social History, 27, no. 1 (2000): 42, 54; see also R. W. Connell, ‘Introduction – Australian Masculinities’, in Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities, eds, Stephen Tomsen and Mike Donaldson (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003), 9–21.

¹¹The seminal account of this backlash is Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context’, Historical Studies, XXII, no. 86 (April 1986): 116–31.

¹²Lindsay, cited in Phillip Butterss, ‘Introduction’, C. J. Dennis, The Moods of Ginger Mick (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 [1916]), vii.

¹³Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Worrying About Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–45; Michael Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History’, History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005): 57–71; Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, chap. 3.

¹⁴Unless otherwise stated, all biographical material about Harry Clay in this article comes from Clay Djubal, ‘Harry Clay and Clay's Vaudeville Company: 1865–1930: An Historical and Critical Survey’ (MA Thesis, University of Queensland, 1998), chaps. 1 and 2, available online at http://ozvta.com/dissertations/.

¹⁵A key reason that mid-range vaudeville operators like Clay have fallen into obscurity is that they left relatively scant sources behind them. They relied chiefly on word of mouth and ephemera such as daybills and letterbox drops to promote their shows, making little use of expensive advertisements in the press or souvenir programmes. Most theatre historians have underestimated the extent of their activity and popularity because of this, focusing instead on more cashed-up city-based vaudeville entrepreneurs like Harry Rickards and the Fuller brothers. This is problematic for anyone interested in the impact of vaudeville on everyday life, because far more Australians saw shows at suburban or provincial theatres than in upmarket urban venues. See the introductions to Djubal, ‘Harry Clay’ and ‘What Oh Tonight’.

¹⁶Programme for Clay's Bridge Theatre, Boxing Day 1919, Ephemera Collection (PROMPT), National Library of Australia (NLA).

¹⁷Howard, cited in Djubal, ‘Harry Clay’, 55. On larrikin ‘pushes’ see Melissa Bellanta, Larrikins: A History (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012), chaps. 3 and 6.

¹⁹Djubal, ‘Harry Clay’, 19; George W. Persley, ‘Leave Me Not In Anger’ (Chicago: White, Smith & Co., 1881); Sydney Morning Herald, 16 January 1893, 6; Brisbane Courier, 8 November 1897, 7; Samuel M. Mitchell and J. Tannenbaum, ‘Sadie Ray’ (Boston: White Smith & Co., n.d.), in the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection (‘Levy Collection’), Box 134, Item 91, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

¹⁸Waterhouse, From Minstrel Stage to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular State 1788–1914 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1990), chaps. 3 and 53.

²⁰ Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton), 25 July 1900, 5; 28 April 1905, 5.

²¹On tenor songs of ‘a higher class’, see C. J. Dennis, ‘Variety’, Gadfly, 6 February 1907, 992.

²² Morning Bulletin, 17 April 1911, 6; Sydney Morning Herald, 29 February 1908, 2; Morning Bulletin, 2 July 1910, 7; 14 April 1903, 5.

²³Stephen Garton and Peter Stanley, ‘The Great War and its Aftermath’, in The New Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 2, eds, Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, 157–63; Murray Phillips and Katharine Moore, ‘The Champion Boxer Les Darcy: A Victim of Class Struggle and Sectarian Bitterness in the First World War’, International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 11, no. 1, 1994: 102–14.

²⁴Bellanta, Larrikins, chap. 6.

²⁵Cited in Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900–1965 (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1998), 132.

²⁷ Harry Clay's Popular Songster, and Harry Clay's New Song Book.

²⁶Djubal, ‘Harry Clay’, chap. 4; Harry Clay's Popular Songster: 1914 Tour, Sydney, Joe Slater, n.d., NLA, and Harry Clay's New Song Book, Sydney, Joe Slater, n.d., NLA.

²⁸See, for example, any of the concerts held in the Concerts and Theatre Programs Collection, Souvenirs 2: First World War; Series 1: Concerts Associated With Ships, Subseries 1: Performances at Sea and Subseries 4: Concerts Given By Military Units, Australian War Memorial.

²⁹Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘The Americanisation of Romantic Love in Australia’, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, eds, Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2006), chap. 11; see also n. 28 above.

³⁰‘What were in those days called ballads’: Interview with Ron Colman, No. 196, Transcript of Tape 1, 7, New South Wales Bicentennial Oral History Project (‘NSWBOHP’), ML MSS 5162, State Library of New South Wales.

³¹Interviews with Tom Roberts, No. 189; Melba Shannon, No. 21, Ron Colman, No. 196; Hannah Nethery, No. 6; Ivy Davis, No. 15; Hilary Maurice, No. 176, all in NSWBOHP.

³²Interview with Evelyn Goodwin, No. 90, Transcript for Tape 2; Interview with Mary Ryan, No. 104, Transcript for Tape 1; Interview with Joe Tofler, No. 80, Transcript for Tape 1, all NSWBOHP.

³³Interview with Harold Atkinson, Unnumbered Transcript, Collingwood Oral History Project, Collingwood Library.

³⁴Interview with Aleck Deitz, No. 2, Transcript of Tape 2, NSWBOHP.

³⁵Interview with Ian Harvey, No. 4, Transcript of Tape 1, NSWBOHP.

³⁶Interview with Walter Tulloch, No. 112, Transcript for Tape 3, NSWBOHP. Hildegard Werner, ‘Two Roses’, in Heart Songs: Music for Voice and Piano, ed. Joe Mitchell Chapple (Boston: Chapple Publishing, 1909), 412.

³⁷Dennis, ‘Variety’.

³⁸Anon, ‘C. J. Dennis’, The Lone Hand, 2 December 1918, 572–3; Ina Bertrand, ‘The Sentimental Bloke: Narrative and Social Consensus’, in Screening the Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film, ed. Ken Berryman (Canberra: National Film and Sound Archive, 1995), 97–106.

³⁹H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature: Pure and Applied, vol. 1, rev. ed. (Sydney and London: Angus and Robertson, 1984), 438–43. See also Butterss’ discussion of Green's views in ‘“Compounded of Incompatibles”’, 18–19.

⁴⁰Anon, ‘C. J. Dennis’.

⁴¹Harry Julius, Theatrical Caricatures (Sydney: NSW Bookstall, 1912), 114.

⁴² Steele Rudd's Magazine, 3 (November 1905): 996–7.

⁴³Songsheet in Levy Collection, Box 129, Item 13.

⁴⁴‘The Singing Soldiers’, in Dennis, The Moods of Ginger Mick, 33.

⁴⁵Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chaps. 7 and 8; Shirley Samuels, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Barnes, Love's Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

⁴⁶For an insightful commentary on sentimental singing among First World War diggers, see Graham Seal, Inventing ANZAC: The Digger and National Mythology (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004). I am grateful to this commentary for alerting me to the primary sources outlined below.

⁴⁷Anon. ‘Why the Soldiers Sang’, Australian Army Medical Corps AIF, Interstate Reunion (Adelaide: 1938), 39 –41.

⁴⁸‘Corporal Geebung’, ‘The Songs We Sing’.

⁴⁹D. Eardley Wilmot, ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’ (New York: Chappell-Harms, 1911), songsheet reproduced online at http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/littlegreyhomeinthewest.htm (accessed 10 May 2012).

⁵⁰Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, chap. 16.

⁵¹Interview with Melba Shannon, No. 21, Transcript of tape 1, 4–15.

⁵²Interview with Beatrice Geddes, No. 65; Interview with Walter Tulloch, NSWBOHP.

⁵³Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View’, 70.

⁵⁴Seal, Introduction to Digger Folksong and Verse of World War One: An Annotated Anthology (Perth: Antipodes Press, 1997); see also Seal, Inventing ANZAC, 57–9.

⁵⁵Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainment (Penguin: Middlesex, 1963, first published 1957), 153–66.

⁵⁶Rosenwein, ‘Worrying About Emotions’, 842.

⁵⁷Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1954); Green, History of Australian Literature; A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1958); Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958).

⁵⁸Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), chap. 3.

⁵⁹McCalman, Struggletown; Grace Karskens, ‘Small Things, Big Pictures: New Perspectives on the Rocks’ in The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland, eds, Alan Mayne and Tim Murray (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001), 69–85.

⁶⁰Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 77.

⁶¹Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, chap. 3.