Tuesday, August 18, 2009

 

Obscurity of the Day: Why All Men Are Not Married


Here's another entry from Charles Wellington, who was filling newsprint at quite a clip at the New York Evening Journal in the late oughts to early teens. This series is about one of the more over-used subjects of the era, the horrors of matrimony. This sort of thing must have been a favorite with the fellows on their way home from work, though, because the evening papers were rife with this sort of wife-bashing.

Interesting to note that this series, which went by the title Why All Men are Not Married in the Journal, was run by the title Gee, Ain't I Glad I'm Single in the Boston American, whence these examples come by the good graces of Cole Johnson. Perhaps that was an undocumented alternate title (I didn't do the indexing on that year of the Evening Journal) or perhaps in Boston somebody didn't like the original title, which is admittedly a bit of an odd phrasing.

In the Evening Journal this series ran June 17 to August 20 1909.

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Comments:
"Ain't you glad you're single" is a line from the song "I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle. I assume that's where the revised title came from.
 
"I got Spurs..." is a tune from a 1942 film, The Forest Rangers, written by Frank Loesser. It would be impossible for Wellington to have been inspired by that film, and highly unlikely that Mr Loesser could recall this obscure cartoon thirty years later.
 
Whoops! Guess I shoulda checked first. Thanks for the correction.
 
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