With your villainous de-mi tasses,
But Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.
The cure for the sentimental song is the ironic; and irony, it happens, is not what America lives on. Even so mild an English example as Waiting at the Church gained its popularity chiefly from the excellent tag line:
Can’t get away
To marry you to-day.
My wife won’t let me.
Yet appearing from time to time we had a sort of frank destruction of sentimentality in our songs. Some, like I Picked up a Lemon in the Garden of Love, appeal directly to the old “peaches” tradition; but we went further. In the same year as the romantic Beautiful Garden of Roses—it was one of the early years of the dance craze—we heard Who Are You With To-night (to-night?...) down to “Will you tell your wife in the morning, Who you are with to-night?” and the music perceptibly winked at the words. I Love My Wife (but, Oh, You Kid!) had little quality, but the dramatization of an old joke in My Wife’s Gone to the Country rose to a definite gaiety in the cry of “Hooray! Hooray!” So, too, one line in the chorus of I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, a song which skilfully builds up a sentimental situation in order to tear it down with two words:
Wonder who’s looking into her eyes,
Breathing sighs, telling lies ...
where the music pretended to make no difference between the last two phrases, except for softening, sweetening the second. Yet another in the malicious mould is Who Paid the Rent for Mrs Rip Van Winkle (when Rip Van Winkle Went Away)—unforgettable for the tearing upward phrase to a climax in the first Rip with a parallel high note on the second.