Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?

DESCRIPTION: "Kelly and his sweetheart wore a very pleasant smile, As bent upon a holiday they went from Mona's Isle." The girl gets lost and begs, "Has anybody here seen Kelly?" When last seen, she is chained to a fence or is in a wax museum, still crying out for him
AUTHOR: C. W. Murphy and Will Letters (although Pegler-SoldiersSongsAndSlangoftheGreatWar and FolkSongAndMusicHall disagree on who wrote the words and who wrote the music; Pegler and Wikipedia both say he wrote the music)
EARLIEST DATE: 1909 (FolkSongAndMusicHall)
KEYWORDS: love separation wordplay
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Pegler-SoldiersSongsAndSlangoftheGreatWar, pp. 221-222, "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" (1 tezt)
Spaeth-ReadEmAndWeep, pp. 237-238, "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" (1 excerpt, from an American rewrite)
FolkSongAndMusicHall, "Has anybody here seen Kelly?"
Roud #V13846
ALTERNATE TITLES:
Kelly from the Isle of Man
NOTES [234 words]: Spaeth-ReadEmAndWeep, p. 237, says of this song:
"The Kelly song, one of the greatest of the 'spelling' type (Harrigan and Mississippi are its closest rivals) has quite a history.... its American adapter [was] William J. McKenna.... Its forerunner had been a song about one Antonio, a hokey-pokey ice-cream merchant, who played his benefactress a similar trick. When Emma Carus sang the original Kelly, it contained the lines:
He's as bad as own Antonio,
He left me upon my ownio....
the reference to the Isle of Man. naturally meant nothing to an American audience, and Kelly was a "'lop' until McKenna made it over for Nora Bayes, who sang it to instantaneous success in 'The Jolly Bachelors.'"
Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000, p. 289, estimates that the McKenna adaption was the seventh most popular song in America in 1910, peaking at #1 in June 1910 (#1 for the year being Whitson and Friedman's "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland"). - RBW
In the music halls, the original version was sung by Florrie Ford, who had her own final chorus: "Has anybody here seen Florrie? F.O.R.D.E...." Forde had also apparently sung the "Antonio" lyric in 1908, inspiring Murphy to produce his remake.
There was a 1928 movie, "Anybody Here Seen Kelly?"-- but it was a silent movie that merely alluded to the song. - RBW
Last updated in version 7.1
File: PSoS221

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