Roses of Picardy

DESCRIPTION: "She is watching by the poplars, Colinette with the sea-blue eyes." "Roses are shining in Picardy, In the hush of the silvery dew, Roses are flow'ring in Picardy, But there's never a rose like you." Even years later, "He loves to hold her little hands"
AUTHOR: Words: Frederic Edward Weatherly (1848-1929) / Music: Hayden Wood (source: sheet music)
EARLIEST DATE: 1916 (sheet music)
KEYWORDS: love separation flowers
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Arthur-WhenThisBloodyWarIsOver, p. 40, "Roses of Picardy" (1 text)
Roud #25454
NOTES [356 words]: Although this was a popular hit, it seems to have made almost no impression in tradition -- Alice Kane mentions it (Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 190), but she learned it in school, not from other children. I find it banal to the point of irritation.
For background on Fred E. Weatherly, see the notes to "Danny Boy (The Londonderry Air)."
Back in the days before all old sheet music seemed to be on the Internet, I managed to acquire the sheet music for two other Weatherly pieces, "Roses of Picardy" and "The Holy City."
"Roses of Picardy," published in 1916 with music by Haydn Wood, is interesting, because Wood's name is printed in far larger type than Weatherly's. Yet Wood was hardly a big name. I checked five musical references to learn about him. Only one had an entry, and it brief. Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, ninth edition, corrected, Oxford, 1960, p. 1127, mentions him, giving as his whole biography, "Born near Huddersfield, Yorkshire, in 1882 and died in London in 1959, aged seventy-six. He had a double career as a solo violinist and as a composer some of whose lighter pieces (e.g. Roses of Picardy) had a great vogue." I do note that Jerry Silverman included the song in the Mel Bay book Ballads & Songs of WWI.
But "Roses of Picardy," as a poem, is banal (though I'd call it better than "The Holy City"); it's yet another song about an old man remembering his wife's early beauty and saying that, unlike the roses of Picardy to which he once compared her, he still loves her:
Roses are flow'ring in Picardy, but there's never a rose like you!
And the roses will die with the summertime, and our roads may be far apart,
But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy! 'tis the rose that I keep in my heart!
Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000, pp. 322, 344, estimates that "Picardy" was the fourteenth most popular song in America in 1918 (#1 for the year being J. Will Callahan and Lee G. Roberts's "Smiles") and also reached #7 in December 1923. But it didn't hold up after that.
Last updated in version 6.6
File: AWTBW040

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