ABSTRACT
The dividing lines between the music of the street, tavern and theatre and that belonging to the drawing room began to be redefined through Edward Lloyd massive aggregation of texts that were beginning to outlive their origins and original audience. This chapter argues that Lloyd’s Song Book in its various manifestations was an attempt to bridge the gap between sociable public performance and drawing room. Lloyd’s Song Book aimed to provide a source of performable lyrics that, drawing on a mass of material drawn from many sources, many of them ‘low’ in origin, would elevate popular musical ambition towards the cultural and social musical practices of the respectable drawing room. The status of illustration is of particular importance in assessing the innovative practices developed by Lloyd’s Song Book. Songbooks had previously relied on a simpler deployment of images alongside texts and a less intense interaction between words and illustrations than the intertwined and interdependent page structures used by the Songbooks.
