Song of the thrush, The

AKA	The miners of Australia The thrush

Lyrics

Walter Hastings

Music

George Le Bruin

Roud

RN1763

Years ago out in the wilds of Australia
Out in the gold fields there once stood a camp
The miners were made up of all sorts of classes
With many a scape-grace and many a scamp
Into their midst came a young man from England
And with him he brought a small thrush in a cage
To hear the bird sing they would crowd round in dozens
The little sweet songster became quite a rage.

There fell a deep hush, as the song of the thrush
Was heard by the motley throng
And many a rough fellow's eyes were moist
As the notes rang out clear and strong
Eyes lighted up with a bright yearning look
As the bird trilled it's beautiful lay
It brought to their minds dear old England and home
Thousands of miles away.

Rough were those miners, all fierce-looking fellows
Yet they were human, and worshipped that bird
When quarrels arose they would leave off and listen
If only the voice of their fav'rite they heard
All round for miles he at last got quite famous
On Sunday the miners would come from afar
And many declared they preferred the bird's singing
To cards and the dice at the rough liquor bar.

Often they thought of the cornfields and meadows
Many a shady and quiet little lane
And heart ached and yearned as they thought of some village
And some they had dearly loved, but all in vain
When the bird sang all those hard fellows listened
Perhaps they got tired of the bird? No such thing
As one rough expressed it, 'He came like an angel
And makes you feel 'Good like' to hear that bird sing'.
 

Collected from traditional source singers several times in UK, Canada, Australia, from the 1950s on. Sung in the Halls by Jenny Hill (the Vital Spark) and then her daughter, Peggy Pryde.

Jenny Hill (1850-1896) was perhaps the most successful female Music Hall artiste in the period before Marie Lloyd. She worked as a child in a factory manufacturing artificial flowers, whilst in the evenings she sang at The Dr Johnson Tavern. Her first stage performance was as the leg of a goose in 1858. At the age of 12 she was apprenticed to an inn in Bradford where she worked as a domestic drudge whilst learning to be a “seriocomic singer”. In an apparent attempt to escape the drudgery, she married an acrobat who taught her how to tumble and do other tricks, but he disappeared when their first baby was born.

It must have been incredibly difficult to be a young single mother in those times, but somehow she travelled back to London and found cheap accommodation for her and her child . After a period of near starvation she eventually persuaded the manager of The Pavilion to let her sing. Legend has it that the tiny, starving young woman sang with such brilliance and force that the audience couldn’t help but love her, and after a multitude of encores , the great George Leybourne carried the exhausted Hill back on the stage to receive her final tumultuous applause.

She was at the height of her fame in the 1870s and had huge success with songs like this one, Maggie Murphy’s Home, The coffee shop girl, and I’m a woman of few words. She bought property, and was famous for throwing huge parties: entertaining the great and the good of the Music Hall world . In the 1880s she tried her hand at running a number of businesses which unfortunately failed. She had some success in reviving her stage career in the early 1890s after touring America and South Africa. Like many in the profession at the time, she died relatively young, though it’s important to remember that life expectancy for a woman born the middle of the 19th century was still under 50. Her daughter Peggy Pryde was a successful performer in her own right for many years.

More about George Le Bruin/Brunn here. Hastings I know little about, though a pianist of his name died in January 1924.

Sources:

• Richard Baker: British Music Hall
• VWML entries
• Lyrics from monologues.co.uk
• David Ramsden can be heard singing it for Steve Gardham here