Shabby Genteel

DESCRIPTION: "Too proud to beg, too honest to steal, I know what it is to be wanting a meal, My tatters and rags I try to conceal, I'm one of the shabby genteel." The singer has seen better days and warns that bad fortune "may reduce one of you in the very same way"
AUTHOR: Harry Clifton (source: broadside, Bodleian Bod131779 Harding B 11(3459))
EARLIEST DATE: before 1867 (broadside, Bodleian Bod13177 Harding B 11(3459)); in tradition, 1951 (MUNFLA-Leach)
KEYWORDS: poverty virtue warning clothes food hardtimes nonballad
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Dime-Song-Book #26, p. 53, "Shabby Genteel" (1 text)
Roud #22504
RECORDINGS:
Leo Martin, "The Shabby Genteel" (on MUNFLA-Leach)
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Bod13177 Harding B 11(3459), "Shabby Genteel" ("We have heard it asserted a dozen times o'er), J. Harkness (Preston), 1840-1866; also Bod18255 Firth b.27(122), Bod13176 Harding B 11(3458), "Shabby Genteel"
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Poor, But a Gentleman Still" (subject)
NOTES [69 words]: There was a whole movement, in the nineteenth century, of "shabby genteel" songs. Presumably this was one of the first, if not the first; Sigmund Spaeth, A History of Popular Music in America, Random House, 1948, p. 173, says that the song belonged to "ht same school [of what Spaeth calls 'silly-ass character studies in the English manner'], with a rather individual attempt at combining a smile with a tear." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.7
File: ML3ShaGe

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