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1: Rumbling On

2: Table Turning or Table Churning

3: Spinning Wheel Songs

4: Summing & Brumming

The following list is drawn from the American Memory Collection of US Sheet Music submitted to The Library of Congress for copyright purposes between 1870 and 1885, so it can be taken as a fairly thorough survey of the American pieces on the Mill subject between those years. It omits pieces published in large collections or book form. There were Songs of the Mill and imitative Mill-Wheel pieces before 1870 but the subject becomes routine in the late seventies, rising to a peak in 1881, slowly declining thereafter. There are a number of trends which strongly suggest that Mills were an established subject for piano pieces and teaching music and were associated with folksong at the start of the period. The early piano pieces and some of the part-songs represent the repeated pattern of the mill wheels, one of the part-songs has a murmuring ostinato: "The mill goes rumbling rumbling on". It appears that the fifteen year span of the collection does pick up the start of the vogue of the Mill song and charts its decline after 1881. I will add details about the British songs of the same period as thy come to light in my own library and on the Internet.

There are a couple of 1874 songs which are celebration of Mill Holidays so they were presumably and unusually about present-tense factory-mills. But during this period the rise of the parlour or royalty ballad moves the subject into the past - typically Grandfather's day, as less of a working environment than a place of private and personal soulfulness, romance and nostalgia. Of the seventy-one titles below, no fewer than twenty-five of them use the word "Old" and five others use phrases such as "moss-covered" or "Grandfather's" to suggest age. In fact by the 1880s, steam power and factory-milling would have rendered many of the old mills as landmarks no longer used - they would indeed have been regarded as belonging to Grandfather's working day. Ideas of restoration or conservation of the industrial past were years in the future and Longfellow's appropriation of an old grist mill to add to the house in Division Street was the eccentric and symbolic gesture of a poet. The sentimental image of the mill was one in which popular aesthetics ran ahead of the arbiters of taste - there is nothing in Ruskin for instance to sanctify an industry because it was obsolescent. Such haunted spots may really have been pleasant places for a tryst but the market for these songs would have been in the towns and the cities where dim memories of a village environment would have been real for some of the buyers. The mills they remembered may well have been in Poland or Lithuania rather than rural Massachusetts.

The business of music-publishing in America was itself emerging from the local mill stage as some of these publications were clearly the work of amateurs, coming from small presses and sold to the backwoods by mail order. The words were often taken from popular verses in newspapers and weeklies. Doctor Dunn English struck a chord with many readers it would seem, some of them happening to be composers, at least on Sundays. This tradition of journalistic populism, of hitting the right spots on the public clitoris more or less accidentally by expressing commonplaces would fairly quickly give way to a more scientific targetting by the mechanics of Tin Pan Alley. It does not mean that the semi-amateur production has any artistic superiority to the later mass-produced ones but the flaws are likely to be more interesting. Some numbers were already being marketed as best-sellers: Skelly's Old Rustic Bridge by the Stream seem to have gone through many editions and the copyright issues were lodged for several different versions. Straight reprints - it had sold over 60,000 copies by 1884 - would not have needed to be resubmitted.

The popularity of the theme rises with the polite ballads. The royalty ballad appears to have been slightly less prevalent in America than in Great Britain during the same period, presumably because there was a more manageable number of English singers whose name on the cover guaranteed sales. The wider geographical spaces of America meant that less play was made on the sheet music covers about the singers. During the period there is a move away from the part-song and minstrel-song towards the parlour ballad but the American market appears to hedge its bets by emphasizing the harmonized refrain to these ballads, allowing them to be performed solo or with a vocal quartet. To a large extent the rise of the Mill subject as a genre coincides with the rise of the music publishing business in the United States. As competition develops, the various publishing houses begin to churn out more or less indistinguishable variations on the same subject. Once the subject strikes a chord, the cover appeal or concept becomes almost more important than the music or the words. It was not unusual for the same cover art to appear on more than one composition. With the exception of the Longfellow Windmill ballad, set in 1885 by Gustavus Tuckerman and then twelve years later by H. Nelson, these are specifically Water Mill songs.

Elsies, Bessies and Minnies of the mill feature less strongly in titles than we might expect but the romantic cliché as it develops ossifies into words addressed to an unnamed lover in recollection of their early trysts. In keeping with the decorum of the parlour ballad, this is emotion recollected in the tranquility of middle age not a direct expression of youthful passion. There would appear to be a natural correspondence between this chaste nostalgic species of romance and the picturesque old-world locale of the mill as a backdrop. The picturesque location gave cover-appeal and the majority of these songs had illustrated, sometimes highly ornate covers. In contrast, there was a tendency for the British polite ballad covers to concentrate on text, often in an ornate script with more or less emphasis on the composer, the author of the words and the singers.

There is not usually any specific reference to the substance being milled, though it is safe to assume flour is meant in most cases but then the real function of these mills is to squeeze out an emotion from the listener. The sawmill song is a nicely American variation which introduces a touch of realism to the genre with the titles sometimes spelled out in a special log-font. The exterior of the mill forms a setting to the recollected romance and indeed the subject was a favourite standard backdrop in theatres and music halls, probably as a result of the popularity of the theme.

Popular music typically discovers a seam of pay-dirt and mines it methodically till it gives out. A successful song quickly produces imitators which are more or less clones. The term "answer-song" has been used to describe titles which try to reach the same market as an earlier success by directly referring to it. In the case of a subject as hackneyed as the Mill, we do not hear specific answers so much as endless echoes down the years. Later entries might add new elements in an attempt to regain the original potency of the theme but inevitably they attest to the fact it has played out.

 

date	composer, author	title & description
1870	W. Malmene, words & music	The Merry Mill, ballad
1870	Fred B. Naylor, Frank Dumont	Dear Minnie who Lives in the mill, minstrel song
1872	anon, English words Dr. Wm. J. Wetmore	The Mill in the Valley, German folksong
1872	Charles A. White, also publisher, "Rosalinda"	The Little White Cot by the Mill, song with chorus
1874	Frank M. Davis	Mill Bank Waltz, Silver ripples, for piano
1874	L. von der Meaden, P. Arkwright	The Mills have closed Today, song
1874	H. P. Danks, S. N. Mitchell	The Mill's Shut Down, song with chorus
1874	C. C. Brace, w & m? reprinted 1882	Neath the Maple by the Mill, song with chorus
1874	James J. Freeman, J. P. Skelly	Down by the Old Mill Stream, song with chorus
1876	John K. Payne	The Mill, No.7 of In the Country, Op.26
1876	Henry Tucker after Old English Christmas Song	The Mill Wheel is Frozen in the Stream
1877	Joseph Knecht, Op.104	The Woman at the Mill, characteristic piece
1877	Eddie Fox, Frank Dumont	Down by the Mill, 4 pt mixed chorus & piano
1877	Eddie Fox, w & m?	The Water Mill, 4 pt mixed chorus & piano
1877	Collin Coe, w & m?	Merrily goes the Mill
1877	Spencer Lane, Samuel N. Mitchell	Bessie the Pride of the Mill, chorus & piano
1877	John T. Rutledge, w & m	The Mill will never grind with the water that has passed, song
1877	H. P. Danks, Samuel C, Upham	The Old School House down by the Mill, song with chorus
1878	E. Mack	The Mill Stream Waltz, for piano
1878	Thomas P. Murphy, D. G. Adee	Oh the Glad Mill Stream, song
1878	William M. Cook, w & m	Grandfather's Mill, mixed 4 pt chorus, piano
1879	Rev. Aaron Coons, J. R. Eastwood	The Old Mill, song
1879	J. N. Pattison	The Village Mill Wheel, idyll for piano
1879	Alfred Beirley, w & m?	The Water Mill, song
1879	V. E. Nessler, reprinted 1881	The Forest Mill, 4 pt. male chorus
1879	Jno. M. Jolley, w & m	The Mossy Old Mill, mixed 4 pt chorus, piano
1879	P. G. Hull, Mary T. Lathrap	The Old Red Mill, song with chorus
1879	Samuel H. Speck, w & m	The Old Bench near the Mill. song with chorus
1880	Theodor Kullak	The Mill at the Brook, teaching piece
1880	August Mignon	The Deserted Mill, song without words for piano
1880	Josef Pedross	In the Mill, Op.4, descriptive piece
1880	Fred L. Morey, Thomas Dunn-English	The Old Mill, song
1880	Arthur J. Munday, w & m	The Merry Mill, 4 pt, chorus & piano
1880	W. C. Worth, w & m	The Old Grist Mill, mixed 4 pt chorus, piano
1880	Phil P. Keil, Charlie Russell	Elsie the Maid of the Mill, song with chorus
1880	Arthur L. Wood, Bridges Smith	The Little Low Hut by the Old Mill Stream, son
1881	A. Jensen, reprinted 1885	The Mill, Op.17 No.2 or 3, descriptive piece
1881	G. D. Wilson	The Mill, Summer Sketches No.2, teaching piece
1881	I. F. Gorham, Thomas Dunn-English	The Old Mill, song
1881	M. G. Montgomery, w & m	The Old Saw Mill, song
1881	Edwin Bogetti, Phill Carman	My Old Native Home by the Mill, song
1881	Jos. Schwenseck, Dr. Theo. D. C. Miller	The Old Haunted Mill, descriptive song
1881	G. P. Ritter, after a favourite melody	The Mill in the Valley, easy fantasy
1881	J. P. Skelly, w & m, much reprinted 82 & pno arr	The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill, best selling song
1881	Alphonse Leduc	The Maid of the Mill Waltz
1881	H. P. Danks, Fanny Crosby	Meet me, Darling by the Mill, 4 pt mixed chorus
1881	James E. Stewart, w & m	Bessie of the Mill , 4 pt mixed chorus
1881	Sam Rosenberg, Leo C. Knapp	Neath the Old Oak by the Mill, song with chorus
1882	Will T. Thompson, A. M. McKee	The Old Brown Mill, song with vocal 4tet
1882	M. S. Brown	The Old Stone Mill, minstrel song
1882	E. Cook	The Water Mill, song, 2 pts
1882	C. H. Whittier, Thomas Dunn-English	The Old Mill, song, Op.24
1882	W. C. Robey, w & m?	Keep the Mill a-going, boys, song
1883	Samuel H. Speck, James Mace	The Old Stone Mill, song with chorus
1883	T. Meyer, words & music	The Old Stone Mill, song with chorus
1883	Adam Geibel, M. F. Mullin	Down by the Mill, song with chorus
1883	B. F. Kendall, W. T. Kendall	My Grandfather's Mill, song with chorus
1883	Julius E. Müller	The Mill in the Valley, descr. piece, Op.208
1883	Andy McKee, w & m	Meet me at the Mill, song
1883	Louis Meyer	Down by the Old Stone Mill, song with chorus
1883	S. Kelly, Gus Williams	As I Wandered by the Mill, song with chorus
1883	David Braham, J. J. Kelly	My Pearl, or The Old Water Mill, song
1884	Wm. B. Godfrey	The Mill, Op.3, descriptive piece
1884	Harry Budworth, words & music	The Moss Covered Mill, song with chorus
1884	W. H. Pontius, w & m?	Song of the Mill, vocal 4tet
1884	Willy Tedesco	In the Mill Impromptu, descriptive piece
1884	J. P. Skelly, from 1881 song	The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill, waltz for piano
1885	Milton Wellings, Beatrice Leason	The Old Mill, song
1885	J. C. Macy	The Water Mill, male 4tet
1885	Gustavus Tuckerman, Longfellow	The Windmill, song

This marks the end of the Library of Congress list which covers American copyright submissions 1870 - 1885

I will add some English titles from my own sheet music collection and from any on-line sources as they come to light for comparison with the American list. Meanwhile the following are noted:

 

1875 c	Stephen Adams, Hamilton Aïdé	The Maid of the Mill
1897	H. H. Nelson, Longfellow	The Windmill
1908	Tell Taylor, w & m	Down by the Old Mill Stream
1908	George van Wagenen, Monroe H. Rosenford	By the Dear Old Village Mill Down in the Valley

This last title seems to be an attempt to get as many trigger-words into the title as possible and we might expect that to be a late development. In fact, titles such as The Old School House down by the Mill appear much earlier on in the cycle so the tendency is for these images to cluster. "By the Dear Old Village Mill Down in the Valley" does have something desperate about it, though, like some ever more explicit pornography aimed at an ever more flaccid old rake.

1870 (2)
1872 (2)
1874 (5)
1876 (2)
1877 (7)
1878 (3)
1879 (7)
1880 (8)
1881 (12)
1882 (5)
1883 (9)
1884 (5)
1885 (3)

The recurrence of a standard theme such as this will obviously tend to reflect the growth of the American music publishing industry during the period with the hectic days of Tin Pan Alley just a few years in the future. Most of the practices which are usually credited to the sharply commercial songwriters and publishers of New York are actually in place already and will merely undergo acceleration in the melting-pot of ragtime and the jazz age. The cloning of songs on a theme, the identification of trigger words and especially the appeal of a picturesque cover-subject seem to have been well understood, if more leisurely applied, during these days of the seventies and eighties. It is the extended period during which the Mill subject remains popular that distinguishes this earlier period. Mills as subjects will be periodically revived but the appetite for nostalgia no longer dominates the market and saturation is more quickly reached with the speed of faster communications. To the concocter of popular fodder there will be no safer method than the piecemeal plundering of past hits to make Frankenstein re-creations. Single subjects will not tend to dominate at any given period but once a precedent is established and a subject is sung about, the chances are that sooner or later it will be put through the music mill again to see what profits can be squeezed out.

Technology is quite often reflected in popular song and there were certainly plenty of electric polkas and other dances. Automobile songs were a few years down the road and invitations to get out and get under represented a new freedom in every sense. It would be unfair to say that the earlier songs ignored the world around them, for there were many political songs and the Temperance Movement kept people singing enough about the Demon Drink to work up quite a thirst. The contrasts of class were a favourite theme of the English Music Hall's "Crutch and Toothpick" genre and the hand-coloured sheet-music covers of this type were much livelier than the politer ballads which in England were rarely illustrated. There were also class divisions in America and some strong examples of communal song which grew out of the women mill workers of communities such as Lowell could be cited as authentic folk-art. They tended, however, to be published in news-sheets and general publications of the socialist movements. Some were very short assertions of unity and dignity, easy to memorize and very suited to mass chanting but not likely to spread beyond their communities or to be sung for mere pleasure. In Britain, political innovations such as the cooperative movement were also reflected, even if the songs relied more on recognition of the buzzwords than any very articulate support for the ideas. Yet the tone of the published songs of the period does tend towards nostalgia and a displacement of emotion into the past, where it was safely untroubling.

The Old Mill was falling into ruin or abandoned but love of a kind had survived. An abandoned mill could, at some level, be an acknowledgment of physical endurance when the wheels had ceased to turn. We might expect a great many themes would serve just as well but the water-mill was especially favoured. Windmills were not the subject of song to anything like the same extent. During this period there is only the 1885 setting of Longfellow with the 1897 setting and Herbert's 1906 musical The Red Mill to come. This strong preference for waterpower suggests that the water itself was part of the appeal and as certain titles make explicit, the Stream of Life is an intentional undercurrent. Wind power, also associated with change but also with the more violent buffets of Fate, has never pressed the same romantic buttons. The older examples of the water-mill, especially the descriptive piano pieces are suggestive of movement but that is not typical of the nostalgic songs. To take a different subject, which was more or less indistinguishable from the mill-wheel as a name for studies in rhythmic motion, the Spinning Wheel did not become an especially popular subject for songs, despite its antique appeal. At least it did not take off to anything like the same extent.

date	composer, author	title & description
1877	Richard Wagner arr. H. Maylath (Jersey ed.)	Spinnerlied, from The Flying Dutchman, piano arr.
1877	Richard Wagner arr. H. Maylath (NY ed.)	Spinnerlied, from The Flying Dutchman, piano arr.
1877	Charles Fraebel,from 3 Instructive Piano Pieces	The Spinning Song
1879	D, M. Lindsay, words & music	My Mother's Spinning Wheel, song with chorus
1880	Anna M. Agnew, Elizabeth Barrett Browning	A Year's Spinning, song
1880	Max Maretzek, after Washington Irving?	A Maiden Dwelt, Spinning Song, from Sleepy Hollow
1881	Robert Schumann, Heyse trans. T. Brooks	Die Spinnerin, song, Op.107 No.4
1881	Richard Wagner	Spinnerlied, from The Flying Dutchman, piano arr.
1881	Wm. E. Ashmall, also publisher	Allegro Agitato, Spinning Song, for piano
1881	J. Haydn Waud*, words George Cooper	The Old Spinning Wheel, song with chorus
1882	Anton Schmoll	Mon petit rouet, Spinning Wheel, étude-polka, for piano
1882	Joachim Raff, revised by A. R. Parsons	La fileuse, The Spinning Girl, Op.157 No.2, for piano
1883	R. Appel, English version by Mrs L. T. Craigen	Spinning Song, onomatopoeic male quartet, Whirr, whirr
1883	Clark W. Evans	Spinning Song, Op.4, étude charactéristique, piano
1883	H. Leslie, from Glee Club Series	Brumm Brumm, Song of the Flax-Spinners, SATB
1883	Adam Giebel, Julia C. Ver Planck	Come Shepherd, Spinning Song, from Puritan's Maid
1884	Hugo Jüngst, from Swedish folksong	Spin, spin, English words by Helen D Tretbar
1884	Gustav Hollaender	Spinning Song, Op.3, for violin & piano
1884	Henri Litollf	Spinnlied, Spinning Song, Op.31, for piano
1884	Carl Schuman: from Tönbilder Op.50, for piano	No.5: Spinnrädchen, Spinning Wheel Étude
1885	Chevalier Antoine de Kontski	Le Rouet, Spinning Wheel, Op.225, Impromptu, piano
1885	Hugo Jüngst, from Swedish folklong	Spin, spin, part song version
1885	W. Malmene, w & m?	The Spinning Maid, song
1885	E. Cathusen, Auber Forestier	The Spinning Wheel, Op.19, 4pt male chorus, German
1885	Edward E. Rice, possibly after Longfellow?**	My Heart, Spinning Wheel Song from Evangeline, opera

* J. Haydn Waud is not a misspelling for Haydn Wood, who was English and born in 1882

**No author is named for the opera Evangeline so perhaps only the name or theme was taken from Longfellow's poem.

The comparison with the Mill Songs suggests that the Spinning Song was not taken up by American composers but remained mainly an imported genre and to a large extent was a subject limited to choral singing and piano solos. Of the above list only nine are essentially solo songs and of those two are from operas or operettas. There is also no pattern of rise and fall during the period with a fairly steady call on the subject about four times a year throughout the eighties.

The Spinning Song genre follows a quite different pattern to the Mill Songs during this same period. There are far fewer examples, about a third as many. Piano pieces and arrangements as well as choral pieces form the bulk of these. It is the solo song or ballad category that failed to rise to the theme, probably on account of the fact that the spinning wheel itself was not really the subject - the songs being sung to its imagined accompaniment. They were celebrations of movement and with two exceptions were set in a present tense not the past. Two classical examples seem to have been the model for many imitations: the song without words of Mendelssohn called Spinning Song or The Bees Wedding and the Spinning Chorus from The Flying Dutchman. This latter was very popular in piano arrangements. Its influence is felt in a host of copycat pieces where the onomatopoeic humming of the wheel is expressed in words like Summ and Brumm. Surprisingly perhaps and unlike in the opera, these are for male voices. This seems to reflect the market which supplied the largely male glee-clubs. Given the fact that spinning was universally regarded as a female activity, this may have been the first application of male forces to the wheel since Heracles. Mixed quartets did get published, however, but this choral category tends to drift into the harmonized chorus of the solo song later on.

Only two or three of these pieces seem to fit the ballad category. The one entry from a female composer uses Elizabeth Barrett Browning's words so seems to be an altogether higher class of song. A large percentage of the songs of this kind have German and Northern European connections, either as folk-arrangements or as original compositions. Another important category is the fileuse-song incorporated in an opera or operetta, the model for which may come from Gounod's Faust or Marschner's Hans Heiling.

Comparing the two categories, it would appear that the theme of the water-mill grew in popularity the more it was displaced into the past. It becomes the site of private and romantic feeling as it ceases to be associated with work and movement. Spinning songs involve a more intimate relation with the machine and a more present-tense emotion. A young girl spinning might daydream of love or an imagined roomful of spinners - as in the Flying Dutchman - may celebrate the swing and hum of the machinery in a form of vocal dance. The spinning wheel was a foreground object and did not trigger the same nostalgia as the water-wheel backdrop. It was not old or made of stone or mossy or disused or haunted or near an elm. Such songs as there were involved more spinning than most of the Mill songs involved milling. In fact almost no mill songs involve millers, as if Bickerstaffe had said all there was to be said on the subject.

One other slightly related song ought perhaps to be noted in passing as it could easily be missed on a list:

1891

Henri le Verne, words & music?

The Merry Singer

Whether a sponsored or spontaneous tribute, this is a hymn to the Singer Sewing Machine.

 © James Beswick Whitehead, 2001