THE FAMILY IN THE MUSIC HALL

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 44, 20 August 1938, Page 27

THE FAMILY IN THE MUSIC HALL

The interesting Whitsuntide conference discovery that the music-hall has given us very few songs about fathers would be difficult to rebut, says the "Manchester Guardian." The only one quoted at the conference in question was "Father, dear father, come home to us now" —which, as was suggested, is not very complimentary. Memory brings back the chorus at least of another which lamented that "A strawberry mark in the middle of my back was all I got from father," which does not seem very helpful either. "Pitcher" in one of his tales of London of the nineties recalled a "sister" act in which there was something about the desirability of going home and confessing all to father—there was a refrain something like "Better confess to father, better confess to the dad," one believes.

But in any case is it safe to judge by the music-hall song, whether comic or sentimental? If we took a family census we shoutd discover with certainty that the most important (musichall) member is the mother-in-law rather than the mother. Next would probably come the uncle (disregarding lodgers), though no doubt the uncle most heard of in music-halls is not a blood relation.

Then there are mixed bags of rela-

tions. A good many years ago there was a song with a rousing chorus, "And who do you think were there? My aunt Jemima's grandmother, my sister Mary Ann, my uncle Dick, my uncle Tom, my rowdy cousin Dan ... ."

Is it not true also that children in popular songs are generally of the male sex—"little nippers" and the like. But need that prove that people prefer boys?

- The result of a "straw vote" conducted by the United States Child Welfare League, in which 51 per cent, of the men approached answered the question "Do you love your mother-in-law?" with an unqualified "No," seems to indicate the persistence of an old and singularly widespread prejudice. For the music-hall joke which assumes a natural enmity between a man and his wife's mother finds support in the folklore of many primitive and widely separated races. Among the Arawaks of South America it is taboo for a woman to speak to her son's wife or her daughter's husband, and a similar, prohibition exists among the Kalmucks of Central Asia, the Ostraks of Siberia, and the Australian aborigines. In Papua the taboo is even more stringent. Not only must a man never speak to his mother-in-law, or she to him, but they must never even meet. If one sees the other approaching he or she must hide.