The website for Dr Martin Shaw OBE FRCM (1875 –1958)

"Which were the good men and which were the knaves?"

Old Clothes and Fine Clothes

 

sheet music fading out into an oval. Musical instructions, 'lively'.

 

25: Old Clothes and Fine Clothes

Recording Artists: Iain Burnside & Roderick Williams

This light-hearted song seems to take its theme from the couplet preached by John Ball in 1381: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ .

The song was published in both the key of B flat and C.

An edition in Braille came out in 1925.

John Pride was was an unconventional character, born in Liverpool, an artist as well as a poet. He suffered from TB for much of his life, and spent his last years in Heswall in the Wirral, living with his old friend Fred Bower, a stonemason.

Shaw’s dedication is To Arthur Batchelor, who seems to have been a personal friend.

 

AUTHOR PUBLISHER DATE SHEET MUSIC
John Pride (1877 - 1941) JB Cramer 1922 currently out of print