Songster

In the leading article in this week's Publishers' Weekly a poet utters the complaints and defines the encouragements to be found in a materialistic world by its unthanked songsters.

A member of a Salvation Army family, she had been a songster accompanying the band around the streets of Chelmsford where she lived with her parents.

On a later occasion he returned to the theme of keeping the individuality of Salvation Army music, and resisting the temptation for songster brigades to imitate chapel and mission choirs.

The woodcock, the snipe, and other nocturnal birds were all gone to rest; but the merry songsters of the wood now filled the air with their jubilee; the nutcracker began his monotonous clattering, the chaffinches and the wrens sang high in the sky, the blackcock scolded and blustered loudly, the thrush sang his mocking songs and libellous ditties about everybody, but became occasionally a little sentimental and warbled gently and bashfully some tender stanzas.

Because the Jew was often compelled to sing and dance to a fixed Mah Yafit melody at the wild orgies of the paritzim (wealthy Polish landowners), many deliberately discontinued singing Mah Yafit, thus causing the text to be removed from numerous Siddurim and songsters in the early 1900s.