Researching Yiddish penny songs (tenement song broadsides of theater and variety show songs, 1895-1925)
Index of songs on this site
Youtube: all the Penny Songs I've recorded so far (with subtitles)
About this project ♦ ♦ About Jane Peppler
List of the still-lost songs: do you know any of them?
Search the blog:

Here we see the English title translated into oysyes.


This composer, Shepard N. Edmonds, has a great bio in the book Spreading Rhythm Around. The book calls "I'm Goin to Live Anyhow Till Die" the best of Shep Edmonds' songs, and one of the very few pop songs on the subject of the hypocrisy of do-gooders. Edmonds was a black vaudevillian and entrepreneur born in 1876 in Memphis, Tennessee. He founded the first black publishing firm in 1904 and later opened the first black detective agency. He died in 1957.

We see listed here three white performers and one very famous black vaudevillian (Ernest Hogan, about whom I've written previously) as singers of this song. There is a record on youtube of Harry Talley but more interesting is the recording by Pete Hampton and Laura Bowman HERE.


Pete Hampton was born in Kentucky in 1871. He performed with Vaudeville groups like In Dahomey and the Darktown Entertainers. He made more than 150 recordings in the United Kingdom and Germany between 1903 and 1911 and toured in Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, and France.


Louis Gilrod was one of the two most prolific writers of Yiddish parodies at the turn of the 20th century.

This song has three verses but I only sang two. Glenn Mehrbach plays keyboard on this living room recording.


Transliteration and translation from the Yiddish after the jump.



When it's all too late

On a pretty summer day I made acquaintance
with a girl so charming, her face so naive and pious,
To walk with her a bit arm in arm,
I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea.
Soon after the second day, listen, I beg you, to my calamity:
She accused me of breach of promise.
The police didn't wait long, they soon put me in jail
Not having any alternative, I said to myself:

What good is talking now, when it's too late
I'm sitting in prison and she's walking around free
I should have understood this earlier
Then I wouldn't be in jail now
What good are complaints when it's all too late

In a pretty cafe I see two people sitting there,
A well-dressed dandy and a maiden ?? young and pretty
She sits, poor thing, and complains, she cries in front of him and says
What's happened with you now, my dear?
You swore to me that I would surely be your wife
And counting on that, I offered you everything, just for you
She cried and kissed his hand, hoping he'd save her from shame
The young dandy laughed and answered:

What good is talking now, when it's too late
What are you accomplishing with your crying?
I swear, it's not a good look for you,
A dame like you should understand
Complaints are useless after the fact

I know a hero, a young man who seeks a wife with a dowry
As long as there's money, he's not worried about whether or not there is beauty
It didn't take long, he got a bride:
An ugly old maid, a mouth full of gold teeth.
The hero rejoiced, she said she had a lot of money!
He could hardly wait for the wedding day.
And soon after the ceremony, she told him
That till now, out of love, she had been deceiving him.

But what good is talking now, when it's too late?
It's a shame and insult as well
Whether he likes it or not, he's stuck with the gal with the gold teeth
Complaining doesn't help when it's all too late.

---

For sheet music and/or performances contact me: jane@mappamundi.com

---