Jane, Jane, Your Singing's Productive of Pain
DESCRIPTION: "Jane, Jane, your singing's productive of pain, It jars like the brake of a train, It rattles like hailstones and rain. Your vocal vagaries have killed the canaries, Oh, Jane, Jane, Jane!" "O Wind from the South Blow some mud in the mouth of Jane..."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1983 (Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood)
KEYWORDS: music bird | insult singing
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 155, "Jane, Jane, your singing's productive of pain" (1 text)
Roud #25546
NOTES [109 words]: It appears that some form of this was known to G. K. Chesterton. At least, trying to find out something about it, I found this in an online edition of Chesterton's "Sidelights on New London and Newer York And Other Essays" (1932):
"They had a grotesque energy that has hardly been heard since the Elizabethans, as in that beautiful but forgotten lyric in which a young lady named Jane is told that her 'vocal vagaries have killed the canaries and druv the gas back to the main' -- an image of startling force, as is the wild appeal of the poet in an echo of the Song of Solomon:
O Wind from the South
Blow some mud in the mouth
Of Jane, Jane, Jane."
- RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: KSUC155A
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