I Love My Motherland

 

 

 

 I Love My Motherland songcard

 

A.J. Mills, Bennett Scott & Fred Godfrey — London: Star Music; Melbourne: Dinsdales’, 1916.

 

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One of the more pompous patriotic songs of the time, on the Florrie Forde disc it is happily paired with the jaunty Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty. Still, that sort of thing seemed to arouse people on the Home Front:

That successful trio of song-writers, A.J. Mills, Bennett Scott, and Fred Godfrey, have reason to congratulate themselves on the result of the big Blackpool productions. Not only have their expectations been realised in the case of their ballad, “Some Night, Some Waltz, Some Girl,” but they have struck another and unexpected ‘winner’ in the new, and till now untried, number “I Love My Motherland.” Kitty Storrow, who sings the song at the Winter Gardens, is an artist with a future. So far as Blackpool is concerned, she has established herself and her song at one bound” (“Song Notes,” The Stage, 13 July 1916, p. 19).

With the Battle of the Somme not yet a week old, Kitty Storrow, in fact, not only sang the song; she did so in the revue King And Country “with the backing of 150 children in the uniforms of British, Colonial, and Allied soldiers” (“The Star Co.’s Songs,” The Era, 5 July 1916, p. 18). The promotion seems to have caught on: “The Star’s latest lucky number is I love my motherland..., which had its first production a week ago....The first thousand copies were sold within forty-eight hours” (The Era, 12 July 1916, p. 20).

 

Zonophone Twin 1725-BRecordings

Black Diamonds Band, in “Songs Of Blighty” (Zonophone Twin 1715, 1916)

Courtland & Jeffries (HMV B-765, 1916)

The Elliotts (The Winner 3059, 1916)

Florrie Forde (Zonophone 1725, 1916)

Stanley Kirkby (Scale 931; Coliseum 973; Jumbo ?, 1916)

Dorothy Ward (Regal G-7418, 1916)

The Unity Quartette (Columbia 2741, 1917)

 

Stage Interpolation

Sung by Frank Dobito in revue Sally In Society (October 1916); by Ivey Latimer in pantomime Sinbad The Sailor, Royal, Glasgow (December 1916); by Lily Morris, Collins’s, Islington, London (September 1916); and by Kitty Storrow in the Huddlestone & Tiller revue King And Country, Winter Garden, Blackpool (1916).