Meet me in Dreamland,

Sweet dreamy Dreamland,

There let my dreams come true.

Song pushing wasn't illegal, although maybe it should have been. 'Song pluggers' sometimes organised events that look a lot like those flash mob videos you see on Youtube, where people break out into pretend-'accidental' music performances. The idea was to popularise a song and make it a hit. Remember, they didn't have radio until 1920.

In this video, Suzie Q Ferguson, the world's most terrible tour guide, goes back in a time machine and gets a job as a sheet music demonstrator in a shop. Sheet music demonstrators played the song for you, so you could decide whether to spent 10 cents on the music. Sight-reading, also a skill.

Sheet music demonstrating was an honourable profession, and often the stepping-stone to greater things. Some remarkable people worked as sheet music demonstrators: George Gershwin, Sigmund Romberg, Jean Schwartz, composer of A Yankee Circus on Mars... Irving Berlin was a song plugger, but he couldn't have been a sheet music demonstrator: he could read a note of music, and played everything in the key of F-sharp. (He used a transposing piano.)

Watch how Suzie finesses the situation with typical 21st-century insouciance. It would help if you practised more and tweeted less, Suzie.

Click here for the video, or watch the embedded version in your Pliny-skin page.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

18.02.19 Front Page

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