Popular Music Of The Olden Time Vol 2

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	640	ENGLISH SONG AND BALLAD MUSIC.

	BLACK-EYED SUSAN. This still popular song was composed by Leveridge, author of The roast beef of Old England, and of several other favorite songs. He was a bass singer at the Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields; and, when more than sixty years of age, still thought his voice so good that he offered for a wager of a hundred guineas to sing a bass song with any man in England. The tune is very like another which he composed to the words, " Send back my long-strayed eyes;" and, in both, he seems to have drawn more on memory than imagination. One of the snatches sung by Ophelia, in Hamlet, and several other old songs begin in the same manner. The words of " Sweet William's farewell to black-ey'd Susan " are by Gay, and are printed in his Poems, as well as on numerous extant broadsides with music; in Watts'a Musical Miscellany, iv. 148, &c. The tune was introduced into The Devil to pay; The Village Opera; Robin Sood,n30; The Chambermaid; The Q-rub Street Opera; The Welsh Opera ; &c. The same words were set by Henry Carey, and others; but Leveridge's became the popular tune. The following version is as it is now sung:—