Septimus Winner - Songs

Songs

In 1855, Winner published the song "Listen to the Mockingbird" under the Alice Hawthorne name. He had arranged and added words to a tune by local singer/guitarist Richard Milburn, an employee, whom he credited. Later he sold the rights, reputedly for five dollars, and subsequent publications omitted Milburn's name from the credits. The song was indeed a winner, selling about 15 million copies in the United States alone.

Another of his successes, and still familiar, is "Der Deitcher's Dog", or "Oh Where, oh Where Ish Mine Little Dog Gone", a text that Winner set to the German folk tune "Im Lauterbach hab'ich mein' Strumpf verlorn" in 1864, which recorded massive sales during Winner's lifetime.

The first verse of "Der Deitcher's Dog" is particularly noteworthy as its first verse has become a popular nursery rhyme:

Oh where, oh where has my little dog gone?

Oh where, oh where can he be?

With his ears cut short, and his tail cut long,

Oh where, oh where is he?

Modern versions occasionally change "cut" to "so".

The original song is written in German dialect, and subsequent verses praise lager but lament the fact that "mit no money" it is not possible to drink, and praise sausages and thence to speculate on the fate of the missing dog:

Dey makes un mit dog und dey makes em mit horse,

I guess dey makes em mit he

Another of Winner's best-remembered songs, "Ten Little Indians", was originally published in 1864. This was adapted, possibly by Frank J. Green in 1868 as "Ten Little Niggers" and became a standard of the blackface minstrel shows. It was sung by Christy's Minstrels and became widely known in Europe, where it was used by Agatha Christie in her novel And Then There Were None, about ten killings on a remote island. In 2005, film historian Richard Finegan identified Winner as the composer of the Three Stooges song "Swinging the Alphabet". Winner had originally published it in 1875 as "The Spelling Bee".

In 1862, Winner was arrested for treason because he wrote and published a song entitled "Give Us Back Our Old Commander: Little Mac, the People's Pride". It concerned General George B. McClellan, whom President Abraham Lincoln had just fired from the command of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan was a popular man, and his supporters bought more than 80,000 copies of the song among them in its first two days of publication. Winner was in deep disgrace, and was only released from arrest after promising to destroy all of the remaining copies. The song reappeared in 1864 when McClellan was a presidential candidate. In 1880 the words were rewritten as a campaign ditty on behalf of Ulysses S. Grant.