Truxton's victory--- together with The beggar girl---and Two strings to my bow

Here the story of Thomas Truxtun’s victory over L’Insurgente in 1799 is told in simpler language (see Truxton’s Victory). The reference to the “eagle soaring in the air” is to the naval flag that bore the thirteen stripes with an eagle in the blue field in the upper left. That flag can be seen on many of the cuts Coverly used for broadsides on naval themes that are now in the Thomas collection. Most patriotic songs are also propagandist songs, sometimes with a party slant, sometimes purely nationalistic. The last verse here simply encourages Americans to enlist and help in the fight “for freedom’s laws.”

The text was not widely distributed but did appear on Coverly’s Beggar Girl, Together with Truxton’s Victory, on Truxton’s Victory, Together with Larre O’Brian (Peabody-Essex Museum), as well as in the Jovial Songster (13).

The pathetic song, “The Beggar Girl,” is one of an emerging type of sentimental songs presenting children as unfortunate victims of fate. It reflects a shift in social attitudes toward the poor. In earlier songs, beggars were usually men, often maimed military veterans for whom sympathy was a matter of national pride.

This text has been credited to John W. Chandler (Moffat and Kidson 248-49, cited in Philbrick)—Anna Maria Bennet’s Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors (1797) may have been the original inspiration. The music is by H. Piercy (1749?-97), sometimes called H. Percy (Wolfe, Secular Music #6945-53; Schnapper 784). It was published by the author around 1800 as a song, a duet, and also as a glee in four parts. Instantly popular, the song appeared in slip ballads, songsters, and newspapers and was later collected in England and America from traditional singers; the text appeared in twenty-one songsters between 1803 and 1818 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters; Roud). The text was used as a filler on two other broadsides in the Thomas collection (Mary’s Song and Polly Wand) and as the lead song (again with “Truxton’s Victory”) on a Coverly broadside that was added to the collection after it was bound in 1814.

The lighthearted song “Two Strings to my Bow” was sung by the chambermaid Tippet in the first act of Two to One, a comic opera by George Colman Jr. (1762-1836) with music by Samuel Arnold (1740-1802), first performed in June 1784 at the Haymarket Theatre. Although her mistress is agonizing between her true love and the man her father wants her to accept, Tippet has no such problems. Left alone, she ruminates: “Talk of Constancy, Love in a Cottage, and the Man of one’s Heart. A Pack of Stuff! No, No! Give me The Lift-hen-up, for my Money!” Then she sings this song.

Fiske points out that “Two to One is one of Arnold’s most interesting scores. About half of it consists of his own compositions. . . . the other half consists of folk tunes, most of them English, and they are all identified with a title” (474). This tune appears to be an original by Arnold as there is no alternate folk title. The lyrics appeared in seven songsters between 1798 and 1812 as well as on Coverly’s broadside (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).