Happy Bob Robinson's Medley Songster. A Collection of Very Popular Songs, Composed and Sung with Great Success, by Happy Bob Robinson [caption title]

[N.p., n.d., likely late-19th century]. Very good.. Broadside, 13.25 x 12.5 inches, with title printed vertically at left and text printed in two columns. Old folds, some wrinkling, minor dust soiling. An unrecorded advertising broadside for an unrecorded (and perhaps unproduced) songster ostensibly written by Happy Bob Robinson, the leader of a traveling vaudeville company that traipsed all over the country in the last two decades of the 19th and into the early-20th century. The broadside prints the lyrics to four songs meant to be included in Happy Bob Robinson's "Medley Songster," touted as "A Collection of very Popular Songs, Composed and Sung with Great Success, by Happy Bob Robinson." The titles of the four songs are "Sensational Medley," "Jim Fisk," "Alabsom - A Parody on 'Kiss Behind the Door,'" and "Slavery Days." The latter song is laid out in three eight-line stanzas and a four-line chorus written in slave dialect, and indicates that at least some portion of Robinson's show was a minstrel act. Newspaper records confirm this, with one article mentioning a "Minstrel party" hosted by Robinson in New Lexington, Ohio. Newspaper reports mention performances by Robinson in numerous states between 1877 and 1903; in the earliest performance noted, in Somerset, Ohio, Robinson was driven out of town after he pulled a gun on his audience. We could locate no other copies of this broadside nor the songster that it advertises.