ABSTRACT
This chapter explores popular images of music, particularly vocal music as expressed in the traditional and vernacular songs of the English-speaking world. It shows that the themes and ideas of the siren myth were commonplace in English-language popular and traditional song, and that the ideas overlap and interrelate. The chapter looks at pieces that deal explicitly with mermaid-type creatures and consider the ways in which the sirenic themes are worked into these. The erotic symbolism is similar in the stage song: and there was a thrush, hard by a bush'T would charm you to hear how he sings. The most widespread mermaid song, which some people might remember from schooldays, is again called 'The Mermaid'. The motif of the beautiful-voiced female has plenty of life in it and gets into nineteenth-century popular song, sometimes in a comic way, suggesting the undermining or parodying of the older conventions.
