"Down by the Old Mill Stream" is a song written by Tell Taylor. It was one of the most popular songs of the early 20th century.
The song was written in 1908 while Taylor was sitting on the banks of the Blanchard River in northwest Ohio. Reportedly, Taylor's friends persuaded him not to publish the song, believing it did not have commercial value. Two years later in 1910, however, the song was published and introduced to the public with performances by the vaudeville quartet, The Orpheus Comedy Four. After the group performed the song at an Woolworth store in Kansas City, it became so popular that the store sold out all one thousand of the copies of its sheet music Taylor had brought with him. Since then, over four million copies of its sheet music have been sold, and it has become a staple for barbershop quartets.
In the middle section of his song, "We will all go together when we Go", Tom Lehrer parodied "Down By the Old Mill Stream" with a stride piano, singing the following words: "Down by the old Maelstrom/ They'll be a storm before the Calm"/.
Read more about Down By The Old Mill Stream: Lyrics
Famous quotes containing the words mill and/or stream:
“My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)