Page:The International Jew - Volume 3.djvu/83

 HOW THE JEWISH SONG TRUST MAKES YOU SING 77

Dell"; "When You and I Were Young, Maggie"; "Silver Threads Among the Gold." What margin did these songs leave for the suggestive, for the unwholesomely emotional ?

In those days the people sang; they sang together ; they sang wherever they met ; it was the days of that now extinct institution known as "the singing school." People could sing together. The son^s were common property, known to everybody, proper to everybody.

Is there such singing today? Hardly. At a recent meeting of young men in a church the chorus, "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here" was called for, and the chairman in agreeing called out "Mustn't say the naughty word!" With that warning the chorus was given. In calling for public singing there is an immediate uneasiness about possible indecency. There was not this uneasiness before the days of Jewish jazz.

In course of time the fashion of public song underwent a change. An entirely new crop of titles appeared, dealing with an entirely different series of subjects than the songs they displaced.

It was the period of "Annie Rooney"; "Down Went McGinty to the Bottom of the Sea"; "She's Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage" ; "After the Ball is Over" all of them clean, lighter than the preceding fashion in songs, but just as clean, and also giving a true touch to life.

Sentiment was not lacking, but it was the unobjectionable sentiment of "My Wild Irish Rose" or "In the Baggage Coach Ahead."

The non-Jewish period was marked by songs like these : "On the Banks of the Wabash," by Paul Dresser; "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree"; "When the Sunset Turns the Ocean's Blue to Gold" ; "Down by the Old Mill Stream" ; "My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon," by Jim Thornton; "The Sidewalks of New York," by Charles Lawlor.

There was also the "western" and "Indian" strain of songs, represented by "Cheyenne, Cheyenne, Hop