Sweet Rosie O'Grady

DESCRIPTION: "Just down around the corner of a street where I reside, There lives the sweetest little girl that I have ever spied." The singer vows never to forget the day they met, and says that the very birds sing her name
AUTHOR: Maude Nugent (see NOTES)
EARLIEST DATE: 1896 (sheet music published by Jos. W. Stern & Co)
KEYWORDS: love nonballad bird marriage
FOUND IN: US(MW)
REFERENCES (8 citations):
Dean-FlyingCloud, p. 62, "Rose O'Grady" (1 text)
Harbin-Parodology, #124, p. 37, "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" (1 text)
Messerli-ListenToTheMockingbird, pp. 220-221, "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" (1 text)
Fuld-BookOfWorldFamousMusic, pp. 543-544, "Sweet Rosie O'Grady"
DT, SWTROSY*
ADDITIONAL: Robert A. Fremont, editor, _Favorite Songs of the Nineties_, Dover Publications, 1973, pp. 290-293, "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" (1 text, 1 tune, the 1896 sheet music)
Aline Waites & Robin Hunter, _The Illustrated Victorian Songbook_, Michael Joseph Ltd., 1984, pp. 175-177, "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" (1 text, 1 tune)
Margaret Bradford Boni, editor, _Songs of the Gilded Age_, with piano arrangements by Norman Lloyd and illustrations by Lucille Corcos, Golden Press, 1960, pp. 89-91, "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #9560
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Sweet Rosie Levinsky" (lyrics)
SAME TUNE:
Sweet Rosie O'Grady Was a Blacksmith by Birth (cf. Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, p. 255)
NOTES [472 words]: According to Spaeth, "Maude Nugent [1877-1958], who sang and danced at Johnny Reilly's famous place, 'The Abbey'... is officially recognized as the creator of Sweet Rosie O'Grady, although there is a strong suspicion that her husband, Billy Jerome, actually wrote the song." The reason for this is that she never wrote anything else of significance (and, according to Waites & Hunter, she was only 19 when she wrote it) -- but let's be serious: This is a silly piece of work. It wouldn't take much of a songwriter to produce such a thing. It became a hit presumably because the tune is good and harmonizes well in barbershop arrangements.
Billy Jerome, according to Spaeth, p. 331, was responsible for such tremendous hits as "Bedelia," "Mister Dooley," "China Town, My China Town," "My Irish Molly, O," and "The Hat My Father Wore on Saint Patrick's Day." Not a particularly inspiring list of songs to my way of thinking.
Fuld seems to think the song was hers, because she tried and failed to get the song published, and so introduced it herself.
Whoever the author, it didn't bring much money to the Nugent/Jerome household. They sold the rights for a few hundred dollars, according to Spaeth, and when the copyright was renewed, they reassigned them, resulting in much quarreling over royalties.
According to David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers and their Times: The Golden Age of American Popular Music from 1886 to 1956, Primus, 1988, p. 119, a writer named Walter Donaldson (who would later write the tunes for "My Blue Heaven," "Makin' Whoopee," "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby," and "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?") in 1916 produced a song "The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady," the contents of which can best be imagined. William H. A. Williams, 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream, University of Illinois Press, 1996, p. 191, also mentions the "Daughter," although he dates it 1918, and says that "The Sister of Rosie O'Grady" also came out in 1918. Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000, p. 319, estimates that the "Daughter" was the twenty-fourth most popular song in America in 1918, peaking at #4 in June 1198 (#1 for the year being J. Will Callahan and Lee G. Roberts's "Smiles"). - RBW
There was a movie "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," from 1946, starring Betty Grable, Robert Young, and Adolphe Menjou; Nugent sued Twentieth Century Fox over the use of the name and lost (rightly, from what I understand; song and book titles cannot be copyrighted). I can see why Nugent was irked; apparently Grable was cast as a saloon singer from the 1890s who goes to London and tries to work her way into the nobility. So it clearly bore no resemblance to the original song. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: Dean062A

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