Tell me this fun little ditty doesn't get stuck in your head the rest of the day! I've been envisioning myself Cancan dancing in a big pink dress ever since I found this on Youtube. Here's what the historian Holbrook Jackson had to say about this all-too-catchy tune:
"In the 1890's the chorus song "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay" spread like a dancing flame through the land, obsessing the minds of young and old, gay and sedate until it became a veritable song-pest, provoking satires upon itself, even in the music halls of its origins. No song ever took a people in quite the same way: from 1892 to 1896 it affected the country {England} like an epidemic..."
The version above is from the 1940's film "Happy Go Lucky," but the original songstress that took the popular American song and turned it into a hit in England, was singer/dancer Lottle Collins. While touring in vaudeville in the United States in 1891, she heard the song "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!" After she sang it at the Tivoli Music Hall in London in November 1891, it became her signature piece {source}. And isn't she divine!? No wonder the song was such a hit...
::More about the lovely Lottie Collins here.
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