There Are Nice Girls Everywhere

 

 

John Bull 40777
Bert Alvey’s 1910
recording on the
John Bull label, with composing credit erroneously to Whit Cunliffe

Listen to Whit Cunliffe singing There Are Nice Girls Everywhere

MP3

 

Fred Godfrey, according to the Performing Right Society, and claimed by Godfrey; published Francis, Day & Hunter music sheet and British Library credit R.P. Weston alone; some record labels incorrectly credit Whit Cunliffe— London: Francis, Day & Hunter, 1909.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Some confusion surrounds the attribution of this song. As noted above, Godfrey claimed he wrote it and the Performing Right Society gives him credit, but the published sheet music accords the honours to another Music Hall songwriting great and sometime Godfrey collaborator, R.P. Weston.

At the Tottenham Palace, late December 1909, “Whit Cunliffe and his infectious, breezy style weigh in with three songs, all good chorus numbers, which hit the bull’s-eye at every performance” (The Era, 1 January 1910, p. 36). One of the songs was There Are Nice Girls Everywhere , which was a big hit for Manchester-born Cunliffe, who sang it in many theatres, including at the Pavilion, London (May 1910), Empire, Edinburgh (December 1910), and Empire, Leeds (April 1911). He also sang it in the Bohemian Concert at the Vaudeville Club on Charing Cross Road, London, in October 1910. He was still performing it, at his audiences’ insistence, at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in September 1928.

The song was also among the innumerable Godfrey compositions that found their way to the Western Front during the Great War, offered up by Sapper Brown at a Boxing Day 1914 soldiers’ concert party given by the Royal Engineers Postal Section, “somewhere in France.”1 And Clarkson Rose sang it “with zest” before a crowd of Rotarians in Eastbourne in August 19492 — “Clarkie” always knew a good song when he heard it.

 

Recordings

Bert Alvey (John Bull 40777, 1910)

Harry Bluff (Dacapo 97; Operaphone 23; Polyphon 8642)

Whit Cunliffe (Homophone 789, 1910; Jumbo 521, 1910)

Stanley Kirkby as “Charles Lester” (Clarion 432, 1911) [cylinder]

Harry Fay as “Fred Vernon” (Pathé 61446, 1911?)

Horace Mashford, in 7-LP set “Palace Of Varieties — Old Time Music Hall” (BBC CN-1426, 1976; reissue of recordings made 1952–58)

__________________

Notes

1  “How Xmas was spent at the front: Letter from a Bournemouth sapper,” Bournemouth Guardian, 2 January 1915, p. 6.
2  “Forty years of comic song,” Eastbourne Gazette, 31 August 1949, p. 8.