SHOT FOR SINGING A SONG.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2084, 20 May 1907, Page 3

SHOT FOR SINGING A SONG.

TUNES THAT SOME FOLKS ABHOR.

A song sung by a gramophone was the cause of a man losing his life at the little Buckinghamshire village of Penn recently. A slat© club was being shared out in the village publichouse, and the instrument in question ground out, among other songs, “Jack, Jack, when you come back, remember those you leave behind you.”

The tune, for some reason or other, aroused the ire of a man named Chander, and he started quarrelling with a companion named Cooper. AVords led to blows, a stand-up fight followed, and Cooper died 48 hours •afterwards from the injuries he received.

During the racial riots at Atlanta a few months a negro started to sing the first verse of “John Brown’s Body.” He was instantly fired at by all the whites within jhearing, and fell riddled with bullets. To us this seems a brutal and unprovoked murder. And so, in a sense it was. But it must be remembered that that particular air is hated by the people of that district, and rouses them to uncontrollable fury. This song is especially disliked by the inhabitants of the State of Georgia, of which Atlanta is the capital, for one line of the refrain “As we go marching through Georgia”; and many citizens can well remember the days when the Northern armies ravaged their homes with fire and sword to those very words, sung to that identical tune.

For a precisely similar reason the Austrian National Anthem is abhorred by the Hungarians. Lord Chas. Beresford discovered this somewhat unexpectedly during a recent visit of the Mediterranean fleet to Fiume. He sent a band ashore to play in th’e evening. The performance was loudly cheered until the tune in question was struck up, when the applause Suddenly turned to a perfect hurricane of groans, hisses, and execrations. Next morning,-the chief paper of the town, the Fiumei IHirlJ'.p, published a manifesto and an apology, in which it was explfiinetb that “the hissings were not meant for the band, but for tho hideous and hated notes of the accursed Austrian anthem, to which no Hungarian can listen without clenching his fists and giving vent to his indignation.” Again, a man might as well play monkey-tricks with a hornet’s nest as sing “The Wearing of the Green” in an Orange quarter of Belfast; while, conversively, an individual desirous of getting his skull cracked could scarcely hit upon a likelier method of achieving his purpose than by striking up “Boyne Water” at an Irish Nationalist meeting.

Years ago, when King Louis Philippe was living in exile in England, the band of the 14th Regliment plhyed on the terrace at Windsor jnrhile that monarch was on a visit to Queen Victoria. As was their custom, they introduced into tho programme their regimental march, and none were more surprised than their bandmaster when Louis showed evident signs of grave displeasure, while certain members of his suite, forgetful of even the ordinary rules of courtesy as observed between guest and host, rose as if to depart. The explanation came later, when it was discovered'that the • air of the march in question was identical with that of the famous revolutionary song, “Ca Ira,’’ to the accompaniment of which, shouted by thousands of angry throats, the unhappy King had only a short while previously been driven from Paris' and his throne. Even to this day the tune is hated by the French loyalists, as is also the “Carmagnole,” while many ultra-en-thusiasts among them cannot listen to the well-known strains of the “Marseillaise” without expressing forcible disapproval. The “Watch on the Rhine” is tabooed in Alsace and Lorraine by mutual consent, because of the disturbances it invariably gives rise' to botween the rougher elements of both the Fflench fciul the German populations. In Warsaw, quite recently, a man was shot by Terrorists for singing the Russian •National Anthem.