I Don’t Know How You Do It

 

 

Letter dated 17 July 1913 from Fred Godfrey assigning the performing rights and
a share of the publishing royalties of
I Don’t Know How You Do It and several
other songs to Billy Williams.

Billy Williams & Fred Godfrey, 1913.

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Favorite 729-ARecordings

Billy Williams recorded two versions of this song: 1 May 1914 for Zonophone (reissued in Canada on HMV-Victor), and ca. May 1914 for Favorite (reissued on Beka Grand, Jumbo, Coliseum and Scala).1

 

Discographers Frank Andrews and Ernie Bayly reproduce a review of Billy’s Zonophone Twin release of I Don’t Know How You Do It, issued just as the Great War was starting:

Admirers of Billy Williams — and we should not be surprised that they exceed the Kaiser’s hordes in numeration — should not miss this for a pension. Evidently, when he made this record something or other must have put him into the best of spirits, possibly for the reason he tells you in this song, that at a Fancy Dress Ball he met a girl dressed as Eve and wishes he had gone as Adam!2

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Notes

1  For comprehensive discographies of recordings by Billy Williams, see Brian Rust, British Music Hall on Record (Harrow, UK:
    Gramophone, 1979); and Frank Andrews and Ernie Bayly, Billy Williams’ Records: A Study in Discography (Bournemouth, UK:
    Talking Machine Review, 1982).
2   Andrews and Bayly, Billy Williams’ Records, p. 70.