Side by Side (dismantled bride parody)

AKA
First Published 1927 (orig)
Writer/composer unknown, parody of Harry Wood original Roud RN12788

Music Hall Performers Florrie Ford (orig)
Folk performances Source Singers
York, Bill England : Dorset 1984
Modern performances
The Corries		 

 
We got married on, Sunday,
The party didn't finish till, Monday,
And when the guests had gone home,
We were all alone, Side by side.

Well we got ready for bed then,
And I very nearly dropped dead when,
Her teeth and her hair, she placed on the chair,
Side by side.

Well the shock did very near kill me,
When a glass eye did fall,
Then her leg and then her arm,
She placed against the chair (wall?),

Well this left me broken hearted,
For most of my wife had departed,
So I slept on the chair,
There was more of her there,
Side by Side.

The original Side by side by Harry Wood, was an American Tin Pan Alley song sung in the halls by Florrie Forde. However, in late 1920s Britain, Music Hall was no longer the only way that most working people got to hear new songs and it would have been heard on the radio and elsewhere. So we can’t confidently say that Music Hall was the source of traditional versions of this song…

However, it was such a popular song with such a catchy chorus, it was bound to be parodied by trad singers and others. This particular parody, in which a groom finds his new bride to be less than he was expecting, is one of a number of humorous traditional songs which follow this plot, referred to as “dismantled bride” songs. Cyril Tawney remembered it being sung in the Royal Navy in World War II, so far I haven’t been able to find any concrete evidence of it being sung before this point. It appears in Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion Folk Song Book, and was collected by Roy Palmer from the singing of Bill York in 1984. Bill York’s version can be heard on the British library sounds website

In some sources this parody is credited to George Younce, a southern American gospel singer who performed and recorded between the late 1930s and 2005. I can’t find any evidence to convince me of this, and most sources describe the authorship as unknown.

Scottish folk group The Corries sing it:

Sources: