I Kissed Her Under the Parlor Stairs

Historical Notes

Francis, Day & Hunter was an English firm of music publishers founded by William and James Francis and David Day in 1877. They were joined by Harry Hunter, songwriter and leader of the Manhattan Minstrels, who sold his interest in 1900. Their first offices were in Oxford Street; in 1897 they moved to Charing Cross Road, becoming the first popular music publishers in the area that became London’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’. They issued music-hall songs, and in 1882 published their first Comic Annual and Dance Album. About 1900 Day formed the Musical Copyright Association to protect the interests of songwriters and their publishers against pirate firms. Members brought the issue of music piracy to national attention; a new Copyright Act resulted (1911), and in 1914 Day helped found the Performing Rights Society. http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.10112 Music-hall performer Herbert Campbell (1844-1904) was born Herbert Edward Story in Surrey, England. He made his first stage appearance at a teetotal hall in Clerkenwell, London. He became a fan of Raynor's Original Christy Minstrels and, while working at a Woolwich gun factory, formed his own amateur band. He later joined the minstrel performers Harmon and Elston but, finding his talents undervalued, abandoned them and gave his first solo performance at the Raglan Music-Hall. He struggled to establish himself without a blacked-up face, but finally his cockney style caught on, and in 1871, he made his first pantomime appearance in King Winter at the Theatre Royal, Liverpool. In 1882 Augustus Harris (Druriolanus), the lessee of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, set Campbell on an uninterrupted run of pantomime success there that was to last until his death twenty-two years later. From 1889 he was joined every year by Dan Leno, and their partnership became the most celebrated in pantomime history. http://www.oxforddnb.com/templates/article.jsp?articleid=49136&back=