Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow

DESCRIPTION: The child regularly brings her cat to school because, she explains, "Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow." She intends to do as she "'likes'" when she gets old, and have a parrot and children.
AUTHOR: Joseph Tabrar (1857-1931) (source: Baker, British Music Hall)
EARLIEST DATE: 1892 (source: Baker, British Music Hall)
KEYWORDS: animal dog children commerce
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Spaeth-WeepSomeMoreMyLady, pp. 258-259, "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow" (1 text, 1 tune)
FolkSongAndMusicHall, "Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow wow"
Roud #13973
NOTES [501 words]: It's songs like this that make me wish we had a keyword "stupid." But the piece proved much more popular than it deserved, so here it is.
Davison, p. 40, reports, "According to Chance Newton and Christopher Pulling, [George] Tabrar was the author of thousands, literally housands, of songs. He wrote George Leybourne's last song, 'Ting, Ting, That's How The Bell Goes,' and was still writing songs and putting on shows fifty years later, well after the First Great War. His most famous song... was Vesta Victoria's 'Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me A Bow-Wow." Apparently his son also wrote songs. But they are mostly silly, and rarely very melodic, and have been almost completely forgotten. Deservedly.
Baker, p. 144, says that Tabrar in 1894 estimated he had written 17,000 songs, and his notebooks provide proof that he had written at least 7200. It seems to me that at most about four were successful. Let's be generous and make the number seven. That means that Sturgeon's Law -- that 90% of everything is garbage -- was far too generous to Tabrar; 99.9% of what came from his pen was unsuccessful.
Tabrar himself described how to write songs like this: "Think of a catchy refrain. Think of the damned silliest words that will rhyme anyhow. Think of a haunting pretty melody and there you are. The fortune of your publisher is made" (Baker, p. 142).
Vesta and Tabrar later told different accounts of how she acquired the song. Apparently Tabrar had promised Vesta's father a song, and forgotten to supply one, so he hurriedly pulled out this piece he had written for someone else. Vesta said she liked it at once; Tabrar says Vesta's mother and father disliked the song. Whatever the truth, she not only performed it, she even took a black kitten that her family had given her and used it on stage for the line "I have a little cat, and I'm very fond of that" (Baker, p. 144).
Baker, p. 91, says that Vesta Victoria was born Victoria Lawrence in 1873; she made her first public appearance in 1883 as "Little Victoria." Her first big hit was "Good-For-Nothing Nan" in 1891. She lived until 1951. According to Baker, p. 90, she "first went to America in 1893 [elsewhere he says 1892] and, in time, became as popular there as in Britain. After one of her earliest hits, Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow, she mainly specialized in songs depicting her as the sufferer of some romantic misfortune such as Waiting at the Church." Her brother Ernest, who wrote under the name "Lawrence Barclay," provided many of her other songs, but this seems to be the only one that lasted at all.
Some of those songs of romantic misfortune may have been based on her own life; according to Baker, p. 92, her first husband, whom she married in 1897 and divorced in 1900, suspected her of infidelity and beat her; her second, whom she married in 1912, was a bigamist (they had to re-marry in 1920, and he abandoned her in 1926). She became a heavy drinker, lost most of her money, and suffered from cancer at the end of her life.- RBW
Bibliography Last updated in version 7.2
File: SWM258

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography

The Ballad Index Copyright 2026 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.