British
Music Hall Song and Politics 1890-1914
John
Mullen .
Talk
at the University of Nancy in April 2026
CLICK HERE FOR THE MP3 RECORDING
Presentation:
Music
hall, not folk song, was the centre of popular music in Britain in
the last decades of the long nineteenth century. Far from being mere
entertainment, music hall song served as a site where class grievances,
colonial attitudes, and workers’ aspirations were voiced, negotiated and
sometimes suppressed.
Music
hall has been on the one hand praised as a true “vox populi” of its
overwhelmingly working-class audiences, and on the other hand has been
considered a reactionary, jingoistic, moralistic commercial voice of High
Empire, tightly controlled by music hall management obsessed by respectability
and by nouveau riche owners. Archival work on large corpuses of song has,
however, been extremely rare, and easy generalization has sometimes reigned
unopposed.
To
judge what popular voices could be heard in music hall song, it is essential to
look first at the different pressures exerted on the making of the repertoire:
industrial, legal, commercial, ideological, and artistic pressures among
others. My contribution will attempt to characterize the contradictory voice of
music hall, seeing this entertainment form as an aid to survival for audiences
in a world far harsher than ours.
Aside
from their songs and turns, the artistes also had political priorities in their
working lives. A vibrant trade union tradition led to the great music hall
strike in London in 1907, an event which can help us understand some of the
complexities of the ideological positionings of music hall professionals.
John
Mullen is Emeritus Professor at the University of Rouen-Normandy. Author of two
books on popular song during the First World War, he has published widely on
the music hall industry after 1880, and its processes and repertoires. His most
recent article, “Structures, Song Traditions, Fears and Fantasies: British and
French Love Songs in the First World War” ( Popular Music History 17:2,
2026), compares and contrasts the very different love song repertoires in the
two countries.
