The Origins of Music Hall
My lords, ladies and gentlemen! The story of the music halls!
Music halls can be traced back to the taverns and coffee houses
of 18th century London where men met to eat, drink and do business.
Performers sang songs whilst the audience ate, drank and joined
in the singing. By the 1830s taverns had rooms devoted to musical
clubs. They presented Saturday evening Singsongs and Free
and Easies. These became so popular that entertainment was
put on two or three times a week.
Song and Supper Rooms
For more middle-class clientele Song and Supper Rooms opened in
the 1830s. They served hot food and provided entertainment until
the early hours of the morning. Rooms like The Coal Hole, off the
Strand in London soon developed a scurrilous reputation. At Evans’
Song and Supper Rooms in Covent Garden singers were paid £1
a week and free drink. The star of Evans was Sam Cowell who was
most famous for his song, The Rat Catcher’s Daughter.
The taverns, saloons and supper rooms would have been noisy and
difficult places in which to perform. The audiences chatted throughout
the acts and could be very unruly often throwing things at the performers
– bottles, old boots, even a dead cat. Industrial towns favoured
hurling iron rivets. In some halls, bottles carried by the waiters
were chained to the trays and the orchestra was protected from the
missiles by steel grilles stretched over the pit.
While women were not allowed in the middle-class, song and supper
rooms, working-class women went to the taverns. In the early days
they would often accompany their husbands and bring along their
children and even babies. Charles Dickens declared in disgust that
the pit had became ‘a virtual nursery’.
The Eagle
The Eagle, in City Road, London was an East-end tavern that presented
regular musical entertainment. The nursery rhyme Pop goes the
Weasel features the Eagle. It is about a father spending his
weekly wage in the music halls and then having to ‘pop’
or pawn his ‘weasel’ to raise additional money. The
‘weasel’ is thought to refer to a piece of equipment
in the tailoring industry. Tailoring was one of the main occupations
in London’s East-end.
The First Music Halls
