POPULAR SONGS

Evening Star, Issue 20586, 11 September 1930, Page 3

POPULAR SONGS

NO MODERN ONES Has any durable and widely-sung popular song been written in tho last decade—anything comparable in the range of its appeal and tho length of its life to such ditties of our parents as ‘ After the Ball Was Over,’ ‘ The Man that Broke the Bank,’ or 1 Daisy Bell ’? The question is suggested (says the Manchester ‘ Guardian ’) by tho plight of tho sheet music publishing business in New York, where, according to the chairman of the Music Publisnex's’ Protective Association of America, a loss of some £5,000,000 has been made on sheet music sales since the advent of the talkies. It is an imposing figure, but tho rot had set in before the. talkies came to accelerate it. The mechanisation of music has for many years been killing the popular song of the old sort. The machines must be fed, and an overproduction of standardised raw material is nowadays available to feed them. No age has had more music available than ours. It can be turned on in any home almost as simply as the water tap. Y T ct none has been so barren in producing songs of tho people. For the sophisticated among our descendants Mr Coward’s peerless satire ‘ Dance Little Lady ’ will doubtless live as typical of our day. But that is a bitter jest at out futility rather than a popular air. The world-wide popular song that used sometimes to reach from an English music hall to tho German beer garden, tho French cafe, ami the “ sidewalks ’’ of New York is dying, if not dead, before a fusillade of “song hits” that Hit and run, leaving no trace behind them. The world is the poorer for its passing, for tho song of tho people that crossed frontiers and was tinkled on parlour pianos from Manchester to Munich did more to stimulate veal fellowship than does all the product of Tin Pan Alley, as America raordantly names that quarter of New York whence comes tho mass production of jazz.