"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"/.
Other articles related to "down by the old mill stream, mill":
... The old mill wheel is silent and has fallen down, The old oak tree has withered and lies there on the ground While you and I are sweethearts the same as days of ... Down by the old mill stream where I first met you, With your eyes of blue, dressed in gingham too, It was there I knew that you loved me true, You were sixteen, my village queen, by the old mill ...
Famous quotes containing the words stream and/or mill:
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)