Popsy Wopsy

AKA He’s gone to be a Mormon
First Published 1868
Writer/composer Charles Merion Roud RN24467

Music Hall Performers Annie Adams
Folk performances Submitted as words to an “old song” for Sprite’s Article, Eastern Evening News (4 Sep 1929), Norfolk England 

From the Manchester Central Library broadside collection

Popsy Wopsy.
or "He's Gone to be a Mormon!"
Sung by Miss Annie Adams

Oh! I'm a helpless female, an unprotected female.
My husband's been and gone, and run away from me, my heart to wring,
He's gone to join the Mormons, those gay and festive Mormons, 
And while he's getting married there, I‘m left alone to sing.
 
Oh! my Popsy Wopsy‘s vanished from my sight,
And we might have been so happy, so we might;
But now he‘s gone away to be a Mormonite!
And now no doubt he has about a dozen wives or more. 

He had a winning manner, a most engaging manner,
And when we wed I never thought he'd come to go and serve me so;
But he was so deceitful, the men are all deceitful!
And bring poor girls, like me to grief, and that's as well to know. 

But I mean to go and join him, go on the sly and join him,
Just drop upon him unawares and put a stop to all his fun,
As soon as I can reach him, this fact I mean to teach him,
Tho' he may have a dozen wives, still I am NUMBER ONE.

Young ladies, take a warning, let my fate be a warning,
That men are all a kind of sort of Blue Beard, and will not be true.
But if they will neglect us to lose they can’t expect us,
For what is sauce for GOOSE, you know, is sauce for GANDER, too.

“Popsy Wopsy” seems to have been a common form of comic endearment theatres and Music Halls in the late 19th and early 20th century. Ella Retford had a major hit with a different song called Popsy Wopsy in 1913.

In the late 1860s and 1870s, there were a number of popular songs drawing humour from the polygamous practices of the Mormons, perhaps most famously James Hillier’s Brigham Young. In 1866 a song called My wife has joined the Mormons was published, after apparently being sung on stage by George Leybourne. It is tempting to think that this song is a riposte to Leybourne’s.

This version of Popsy Wopsy was extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In the USA the song was famously sung by Annie Alexander, and American sheet music is available credited to Annie Alexander/Paul Rutter. A slightly different version was also published in the USA , Popsy Wopsy: I’m a Lone Grass Widow credited to Harry Miller , it included a dance. It is very common in this period to see music written for the British Halls attributed to other writers in the USA. Songs could cross the Atlantic in both directions at that time, but on balance I think it’s most likely that this song was first written and performed in Britain

The Era has Annie Adams singing it in London in April 1868 (April 26 1868) and later that year reviewed the newly published sheet music, both more than a year before the earliest reference I can find to the song being performed in America in late 1869 when it was published in Henry de Marsan Singers Journal.

Sept. 6, 1868; The Era 

British sources credit Charles Merion as the writer composer.

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