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The Early History of Guitar Sex Euphemism

in The Parlour Songster, Containing a Superior Collection of the Most Popular Sentimental Songs (1844)

In a 2015 Bustle article, Averi Clements compares a 1785 text by Francis Grose to today’s Urbandictionary.com. Quoting from the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Clements presents a list of 20 eighteenth-century suggestive slang words for sexual behaviour. The list includes two musical metonyms: “to bagpipe” referred to fellatio—or more colloquially, the act of performing a blowjob—and “to strum” meant to have sex with a woman [i]. The second of these vernacular verbs is of particular relevance to my interest here: the early history of guitar sex pop music euphemism. For this, we turn our attention to the oldest—and most expensive—item in the Sentimental Museum.  

Published in 1844, The Parlour Songster, Containing A Superior Collection of the Most Popular Sentimental Songs, Many of Which Are Now First Printed features the lyrics to nearly three hundred songs across its 240 palm-sized pages. The hard-cover volume contains a descriptive title page with an etched frontispiece entitled “The Miser” that was engraved by Edwin M. Ellis (1809-1882). Ellis was an engraver known for his portraits and landscapes. He lived in Philadelphia where he achieved notoriety as the engraver for Godey’s Lady’s Book, a women’s magazine founded by Louis Antoine Godey and published from 1830 to 1878. Two additional, but unsigned, wood engravings are included within the volume’s pages.  

In addition to the lengthy title, publication details also mark the opening page. Turner & Fisher published The Parlour Songster and the title page lists both of the firm’s two offices at 74 Chatham Street in New York and at No. 15 N. Sixth Street in Philadelphia. Renamed Park Row in 1886, Chatham Street was a center of entertainment in mid-nineteenth century Manhattan. It boasted hotels, saloons, theatres, and eventually vaudeville, as well as Printing House Square, a primary publisher of cheap ephemera—musical and otherwise. This locale was marked with poverty and prostitution; nineteenth-century writers expressed race- and class-based anxieties about the relationship between what was referred to as street literature produced here and its audience or market.

Following the title page and Ellis’s engraving, the volume then jumps to the real business at hand: popular sentimental songs. The Parlour Songster—like other songsters—does not feature notated music, but instead only song lyrics, most of which are unattributed. “The Minstrel Boy” is a rarity in that it names the tune to which its lyrics should be sung—”The Moreen”—but the vast majority of songs in The Parlour Songster do not reference these kinds of sonic traces. The extended subtitle claims to proffer many new songs, but a significant number were already popular at the time of publication. These include: “Robin Adair”; “Coming Thro’ the Rye”; “Ellen Aureen”; “Hail Columbia”; and “Oft in the Stilly Night” to name a few. Like other sentimental songs of this era, many of the songs are performed in the first person from the perspective of a male protagonist. “I Love My Jean” and “Oh! Mary, When the Wild Winds Blow” are just two examples. It was not uncommon for volumes in this style and of this era to feature a lengthy preface about the songs within or to attribute the collection to its compiler or compilers, but The Parlour Songster offers neither. The final pages of the volume offer a useful index of songs, alphabetized by the first word of each song’s title.

While most of the songs included herein do not identify a songwriter or author, several employ the practice of listing the performer associated with the song as in the case of “The Rose of Cashmere” which, as noted, was “Sung by Mr. Wilson.” At least a dozen songs in The Parlour Songster are marked with the notation “As Sung by Mr. Dempster.” These include sentimental numbers such as “Oh! Promise Me to Sing, Love.” The text for “Auld Robin Gray” notes that the song was not only sung by Mr. Dempster but also received “at the concerts, with unbounded applause.” William Richardson Dempster (1809-1871) was a Scottish singer and composer who traveled often to the US to perform. Nicholas Tawa describes Dempster’s popularity as a singer:

Although of inadequate strength to fill a large hall, his voice was admired for its sweetness and its effective projection of the sentiments in parlor ballads, especially those of his own composition. Dempster spent several years in America, then traveled back and forth to Great Britain, giving concerts on both sides of the Atlantic. He was always, however, more popular in America than in his own country; large numbers of Americans came to hear him and many declared him to be the finest English ballad singer then appearing in the United States [ii].

Of the songs attributed to songwriters, Thomas Moore (1779-1852) gets the most play. The popular Irish poet, singer, and songwriter penned five of the Parlour Songster texts: “Then Look Not Thou So Bright and Blessed”; “Unbind Thee, Love”; “Then First From Love”; “Sovereign Woman”; and “The Thorn.” Henry Russell, a singer known for his tearful and tear-jerking performances of sentimental songs, also has a song in The Parlour Songster. Russell’s “The Orphan Ballad Singers” relies on one of the most familiar stock characters of sentimental literature and song: the parentless child.

And now to the most titillating titles of the collection. “Oh, Lady, Touch Thy Lute Again” and “Listen to My Wild Guitar” are the most intriguing songs in The Parlour Songster, offering an early pop history of guitar sex double entendre. The collision of these instruments with suggestiveness is no accident; recall that “to strum” refers to a stringed instrument. Both songs feature typical sentimental song references to hearts, tears, and even death—paging Monteverdi!—but they also recode sentimental references to music’s power to move and to stir by positioning the guitar as a sexy, but safe intermediary.

“Oh, Lady, Touch Thy Lute Again” is included in several other songsters from the early nineteenth century and the University of St. Andrews Library claims to hold a piano-vocal score (!) An 1824 issue of The Monthly Magazine; Or, British Register features a performance review of the song that reveals several additional details: the song was written by W. Bygrave, Esq. and composed and sung by S. Nelson “at the Nobility’s Concerts”:

Of this ballad we cannot speak in terms of high commendation. The air is neither remarkable for its novelty nor its beauty. The only merit it possesses is that of being consistent with Mr. Bygrave’s words, which, both poetically and mechanically, are as poor as any that we have read for a long time (Vol. 58, Sept. 1, 1824, 164).

“Listen to My Wild Guitar” features in at least one other songster and The British Library lists a 5-page score, published by Mayhew & Co. in 1827 in its holdings. An 1829 volume of The Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle notes that “Listen to My Wild Guitar” was written as a companion to the celebrated Serenade, ‘The Light Guitar,’ composed by John Barnett.

To be clear, the question of sexual autonomy is not a topic I take lightly nor one that I understand as transhistorical. But long before Jimi Hendrix did the “Wild Thing” with his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival, or Taylor Swift bedded hers in the video for “Teardrops on My Guitar”—also sentimental!—nineteenth-century songwriters composed euphemistically sexual songs about stringed instruments. We will never know what these two jams sounded like when singers gathered around The Parlour Songster, or if people chose to sing these two songs at all; however, it doesn’t require a leap of the sonic imagination to hear their continued resonances in more contemporary pop song.

[1] Clements, Averi. “How to Talk Dirty Using 18th Century Sex Slang, Because It’s Time to Take Your Sexting on a Time Machine Ride.” Bustle. May 19, 2015. Accessed July 10, 2019.https://www.bustle.com/articles/82866-how-to-talk-dirty-using-18th-century-sex-slang-because-its-time-to-take-your-sexting

[2] Tawa, Nicholas E. Dempster, William Richardson. Grove Music Online. July 1, 2014. Accessed July 9, 2019, from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002262206

For more about the history of sex, guitars, and popular music, see:

Powers, Ann. Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.

Waksman, Steve. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Here’s how to cite this blog post:

Gale, Emily. “The Early History of Guitar Sex Euphemism.” Sentimental Museum of Musical Ephemera. July 11, 2019. Accessed month, date, year, from http://sentimentalmuseum.com/the-early-history-of-guitar-sex-euphemism/

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AMS/SMT Fashion Ethnography: AMS = American Musicological Style

By Emily Gale, Matthew Jones & Victor Szabo

The following fashion ethnography was co-authored by my PhD cohort at the University of Virginia and prepared under the influence of/in reference to Brenda Dickson’s Meet My Cat Snow (see below). While not exactly a piece of sentimental musical ephemera, we wrote this ethnography just over ten years ago and thus it makes me feel a little sentimental.

A remarkable deficit of fashion plagues modern academia, one that is reflected in the stereotypical image of the dowdy music theorist or musicologist. Such caricatures are both constructed and performed by members of the respective societies, particularly those of the older vanguard. Picture, for example, the rumpled suits and disheveled or outmoded hairstyles of many of our esteemed colleagues. Such a look is characteristic of traditional musicological fashion and style.

While a growing trend towards ethnographic research methods can be found in many of the individual papers at AMS/SMT, little attention has been paid to another crucial element of the 21st century conference-going experience: a passion for style (and fashion). This project paves the way for further consideration of certain performative aspects of academic conferences, and may participate with other work in anthropology, social science, performances studies, and theater as well as the history of costume and fashion. According to Susan Thomas, younger generations of scholars seem to have higher fashion expectations than their senior colleagues.  Not only are younger scholars expected to deliver perfect prose and provocative postulations in their presentations, they are also expected to deliver persuasive fashion and style. Our observations during the 2008 AMS/SMT meeting in Nashville, TN support such a claim.  

One’s role at the conference—be it senior scholar, junior faculty, student presenter, or interested observer—directly influences decisions regarding fashion and style. Jada Watson, a first year PhD student, identified the fashion pressure that she felt in preparing for this year’s conference. Watson’s experience differed, perhaps, from other younger scholars because of the fact that she herself was presenting a paper. In a pre-conference consultation, Watson revealed her fashion anxieties and requested advice concerning her choice of blouse. Gale’s feedback may have influenced the resulting fashion presentation on Saturday night’s panel.  Watson admitted that she felt pressure to be conservatively fashionable. For this conference, she wore a suit—a pinstriped suit from Ann Taylor Loft. She also decided to go with the bold crimson puffed sleeved blouse. This is a classic look.

Carrie Allen, a sixth-year PhD candidate at The University of Georgia, expressed rather different feelings concerning conference style. During a conversation Saturday afternoon, she shared her thoughts on how to achieve “that look.” Allen offered herself as an example of appropriately stylish conference attire. Unlike Watson, Allen did not present a paper at AMS, which liberated her from the conservative expectations of musicological fashion. The “Carrie Allen Look” normally consists of a tension between a bold showpiece against a subtle backdrop. Typically, Allen chooses exciting, though not revealing, tops or sweaters paired with a more traditional trouser. Allen’s shoes are often the most dramatic component of the look, and she feels that an exciting shoe can “make or break a conference look.” On Saturday, Allen wore a daring turquoise number with three-quarter length sleeves atop a cream blouse and khaki pants.  Chunky jewelry—a necklace and contrasting earrings—added pizzazz to her ensemble, while a pair of gilded heels with sequins completed the look. Allen insisted that we note her outfit would have been much less bold had she been presenting.

Senior scholar and SMT Chair, Justin London, has created a fashion sensation at SMT meetings. Yale PhD student Jay Summach noted his extraordinary disappointment on the first day of the meeting when London was spotted sporting a simple turtleneck! Known for his scrupulous sense of fashion, especially relative to the longstanding tradition of suit and tie that haunts male SMT members, London is usually seen playing against the music theorist fashion tradition by wearing pastel-colored dress shirts, elaborate bowties, and printed wool sweater vests.

When searching for “that look,” our subjects have found that their eyes are drawn to the fashion they like. Fred Maus was overheard describing the importance of sweaters for his unique look. He also emphasized the significance of one’s choice in shoes. Here, black “e-thletic” shoes support both his arches and his commitment to equity and ethics in fashion.

Often, presenters’ looks transport the audience into the worlds of their paper topics.  During her paper titled “The Damnation of Mignon,” Carolyn Abbate sported a fetching black, red, and white scarf, tucked sassily into her belt which she wore slightly above waistline on the outside of her sweater; a blue flower at the neckline added an unexpected though nonetheless delightful doucement. Appropriately, Abbate’s attentiveness to lightness in fashion, as well as in opera, left multiple audience members in a state of wonder. Her careful attention to stylistic detail closely mirrored the extraordinary content of her paper while maintaining a subtle tension with her no-frills delivery. In Abbate’s case, medium, message, style, and fashion dissolve into an undifferentiated, virtuosic performance.

Several other AMS/SMT presenters achieved looks that coordinated with, as well as against, their paper topics. In the case of early modernist Martha Feldman, her brocade bell-sleeved jacket appeared consonant with her equally busy presentation. Jeff Kallberg’s traditional l’habit noir mirrored his conservative approach to “Chopin’s Music Box.” And yet while some might assume that the dress of an early modernist might not be so very modern, the magic generated by Bonnie Gordon’s ensemble could hardly be called artificial.

We would like to account for our own fashion choices, as they certainly played a constitutive role in this year’s overall “look,” and the resultant discussions about fashion during the conference. During a walk back to the convention centre, a group of Canadian graduate students commented on Gale’s sense of conference fashion, which was described by a male colleague as “eclectic.” A female music theorist noted that “eclectic” was a very masculine way to describe her outfits. To clarify, the male colleague affirmed that he intended the term as a compliment. Gale informed them that Value Village contributed to her “eclectic” look. A high-waisted vintage wool pencil skirt was chosen to accentuate her mustard-colored wedge heels. Gale’s look confirms that shoes are a very important part of fashion.

Jones’s personal style alternates between deconstructed preppy and just-rolled-out-of-bed, a characterization reflected in his fashion decisions for AMS. On Saturday, Jones received a stamp of approval for his choice of patterned sweater vest, pin-striped shirt, and diagonally striped tie by one of our fashion informants, Watson. Upon seeing Jones outside the book display, Watson pronounced “I love… your sweater.” The moment was very dramatic.

 On Sunday, Szabo particularly noted the importance of practicality in fashion. Though most other musicologists practically attuned to the much colder weather in Nashville on Sunday morning, Szabo decided to favor a stylish look over comfort when selecting a solid brown short-sleeved polo for his “dressed-down” look for the final day of the conference. His visible discomfort while shopping for boots near the convention center provoked a local to comment, “aren’tcha freezin’ in that?” This woman, wearing a black felt coat, giant knitted hat, bleached jeans, and tennis shoes, clearly valued comfort over fashion.

While it may seem superfluous to consider the role of fashion in an academic climate, the role of the presenter—including the clothes they wear—constitutes an important part of the conference text. Particular expectations and traditions make up an often-ignored set of subcultural practices that academics have long taken for granted. Whether these expectations result from the exercise of power, hidden deep beneath the intellectual content of an AMS/SMT conference, or from the thoughtless iteration of traditions handed down through generations of scholars, at the close of this year’s AMS/SMT, we can only surmise that originality in fashion will transform the stereotyped image of music scholars in years to come. Leather, anyone?

Here’s how to cite this blog post:

Gale, Emily, Matthew Jones, and Victor Szabo. “AMS/SMT Fashion Ethnography: AMS = American Musicological Style.” Sentimental Museum of Musical Ephemera. March 31, 2019. Accessed month, date, year, from http://sentimentalmuseum.com/ams-smt-fashion-ethnography/