1844 PARLOUR SONGSTER. Early American Romantic or Bawdy Songster with Original Songs.

A very scarce romantic songster from the popular presses of Turner & Fisher. Located in Manhattan at 74 Chatham Street in New York, this area of the city was a hub of all manner of popular entertainment. It boasted hotels, saloons, theaters, and eventually vaudeville. It was also contained Printing House Square, a primary publisher of cheap ephemera, musical and otherwise. Then there was the underbelly and night life; the entire corridor was marked by poverty, homelessness, public drunknenness, and rampant prostitution. Turner & Fisher turned out exactly the sort of "popular literature" devotional writers warned about; emerging as a sort of metaphorical gutter monster from this seedy nineteenth-century neighborhood.

It is popular today with historians and academics today to see the songs as coded with double-entendre. This particular volume contains two notable examples, i.e. Listen to My Wild Guitar and Oh Lady, Touch Thy Lute Again.  

None in the trade and not offered at auction since 1917. 

The Parlous Songster, Containing a Superior Collection of the Most Popular Sentimental Songs, Many of which are now First Printed. New York. Turner & Fisher. 1844. 240pp.

Good + condition in original publisher's cloth; through at extremities as shown. Stable. Fly leaf and frontis not present. All else good + with some light handling and occasional turns / bumps at corners.