I'm Henery the Eighth I Am

DESCRIPTION: "You don't know who you're lookin' at, now have a look at me I'm a bit of a nob I am, belong to royaltee." His wife has had eight husbands, all named Henry, so "I'm Henery the Eighth I am." He has various adventures as a pseudo-monarch
AUTHOR: Fred Murray and R. P. Weston (1878-1936) (source: Wikipedia)
EARLIEST DATE: 1910 (year of composition, and sung by Harry Champion, according to Wikipedia)
KEYWORDS: royalty humorous marriage campsong
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1509-1547 - Reign of Henry VIII of England
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (3 citations):
LibraryThingCampSongsThread, posts 118, 119, "(I'm 'Enery the Eighth I am" (2 fragments from users Tess_W and John5918, posted September 28, 2021)
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, pp. 95, 415, "I'm Henry the Eighth" (notes only)
DT, HENERY8*
ST LTCDHen8 (Partial)
Roud #30028
ALTERNATE TITLES:
Henry the Eighth
NOTES [276 words]: Obviously a music hall song, but re-popularized in the 1960s by Herman's Hermits (in a version that dropped much of the text) and apparently fairly well known.
For the long list of songs by R. P. Weston, or Weston and Bert Lee, see the notes to "Goodbye-ee."
This is probably the biggest hit of the songs popularized by Harry Champion, one of the great music hall performers of the early twentieth century. John Mullen, The Show Must Go On! Popular Song in Britain during the First World War, French edition 2012; English edition, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 141-144, gives a capsule biography of Champion.
He was born William Crump in 1866. His father was a cabinet-maker who pushed him into an apprenticeship to a cobbler, but young William/Harry always intended a stage career. He initially performed in blackface before starting to do solo comedy. He often sang in a rapid-fire but clearly-enunciated monotone; the speed with which he sang was noted by all observers. He used a cockney accent and some cockney dialect. He would occasionally ad lib some of his words, in ways that sometimes caused trouble with the strict official morality of the Edwardian era. He continued to perform until the 1930s, and died in 1942.
As of this writing, four songs associated with Champion are in the Index: "Any Old Iron," "I'm Henery the Eighth I Am," "Little Bit of Cucumber," and "My Old Iron Cross." The first three are still remembered today (as Mullen comments on p, 144, "He is one of the few music-hall singers whose songs have not been completely forgotten"); "My Old Iron Cross" does not seem to have gone into tradition, but it was well-known at the time. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: LTCDHen8

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