to listen to the strains of "Bill Bailey won't you please come home". If this is your first visit to these webpages or you have not been here for a long time then please check new visitor for site information and how to use the song tables. Regular visitors and old hands please press on straight ahead! You might like to try our alternative mirror sites
The pub and music-hall songs listed below are represent perhaps about only a third of this class of song that I have sung in public at some stage in my life. I have only listed those songs which I have taken into my unpublished song books. This list may be extended if I ever get round to completing this task.
Music-hall and pub songs together with nursery rhymes formed the first encounter with the world of music which started on my mothers knee. They provided the staple self-entertainment for my seven-member family (parents, 1 brother and 3 sisters) in the 1940's and early 1950's. My father was a natural entertainer and had a huge repertoire of jokes, pub songs and monologues. My mother, too, was no slouch and was au fait with all the well-known and lesser-known nursery rhymes. She even had some songs that I've never seen in print or heard from others. Chiefly in winter, we would sit in a tiny back-room (the only heated room in the house) round a coke-fire and sing these songs. All had to a "turn" even the youngest.
Later as radio and television came into our lives, variety and music-hall programmes in both media gradually took over our family sing-songs (sadly when looking-back but in those days we were quite in-step with the march of time and bang-up-to-date). On joining the Royal Navy in 1957, pub-singing entered my life which I very much enjoyed until leaving the service in 1968. This was generally in the meaner pubs in Portsmouth and Plymouth as well as in the various fleet-canteens around the world (Gibraltar, Malta, Singapore, Hong Kong) not forgetting the tiny bars just outside the Singapore Royal Navy Base in the kampong of Sembewang. Since then I have never sung any of these songs, except for once or twice with Brian Kelly in the Irish Pub, Schnoor, Bremen.
For those dear surfers that don't know, music-hall songs were quite complicated. They generally were made up of two tunes and sets of lyrics, one, a narrative-part for the performer and the other, a chorus for the listeners. The chorus was normally sung twice.
The pub "singing" that I knew and loved was a raucous affair. It was just one long never-ending medley of one verse songs or choruses from music-hall songs. The main thing was that it had to be as loud as possible.