We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
78 ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN'
and patched all over. Round about this time I started to write songs for myself, frequently taking an idea, for which I paid a few shillings, and twisting it round into a completely new song. This was what happened in the case of a song entitled "Mary Couldna' Dance The Polka," a female character study into which I introduced some droll dancing, and which always sent the lady members of my audience into fits of merriment.
But in my heart of hearts I was never satisfied with these early songs of mine. They were crude. I knew it. I made up my mind to produce better stuff. I realized that merely to redden one's nose, put on a ridiculous dress and cavort round the stage would never get me anywhere out of the rut of the five or ten shilling-a-night entertainer at purely local functions. And already I was having dreams of wider fields. I felt that if I could get together a repertoire of really good songs I might yet have a chance of making a successful attack upon the stage proper. An opportunity to this end was to present itself sooner than I had imagined or hoped for.
After doing a "turn" at a Saturday evening concert in Motherwell one of the artistes on the bill with me urged that I should send in my name as a competitor for a forthcoming "Great Comic Singing Contest" under the auspices of the Glasgow Harmonic Society. This was an organization of temperance people who ran Saturday evening "soirees," or tea-fights, as they were called, in three of the large public halls in different parts of the city. The main object of the promoters was to keep the working people off the street and out of the public-houses.
These entertainments had an amazingly successful vogue for many years. After the "tea and cookies" had been consumed a long and varied concert programme was put on. Frequently a vaudeville "star" of the first magnitude would be engaged from one or other of the local music-halls or brought up specially from London. On these nights the