SONGS AND HISTORY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3217, 13 May 1911, Page 8

SONGS AND HISTORY.

NATIONAL ANTHEMS. WRITTEN

BY FOREIGNERS

It will be news to meet people that the air of the classic ditty, “We Won’t Go Home Till Morning”—which is, of course, a variation of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” —was originally the music of a pathetic French folk "song.

Tliat this is the fact we have on the authority of Sir Ernest Claike, chairman of the Folk Song Society. Reference was made to it by Sir Ernest in an entertaining lecture on “Songs That Have Made History,” which lie delivered before the Incorporated Society of Musicians. In the original the air was suposed to have been sung by a French peasant woman in the form of a hymn for her husband’s safety on his> departure for the wars. She continued to sing the hymn until her husband was brought back to her dead. Before the Terror, said Sir Ernest, ■Mane Antoinette used to sing to the Dauphin a popular song, “Ma lib rook s’en ya-t-en guerre,” which had got mixed up in some obscure way with our great general, Marlborough, and was freely translated into English as: — Malbrook, the prince of commanders, Has gone to the war in Flanders. His fame is like Alexander’s.

But when will he come home? And the adapter supplied an answer, not in the original:—/ • ‘ Be won’t come home till morning, Till daylight doth appear. And about 1830 the delicate and rather melancholy French air of Malbrook was turned into the convivial song, “We Won't Go Home Till Morning,” the second verse of which began, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

Sir Ernest Clarke’s remarks went to show that many of the patriotic airs tnat people of all nations hold so dear were developed from the music or words of men of other countries. Thus the 'Marseillaise” wa6 by a German at Strassburg in 1792. The music of the “Star Spangled Banner” was originally Stafford’s Smith’s glee to “Anacreon in Heaven,” so that America’s principal patriotic air was set to the music of an English composer.

Our own national anthem was evolved from a musical manuscript discovered in 1622 by a Dr John Bull.