Masculine Women! Feminine Men! Which Is the Rooster? Which Is the Hen

New York: Edgar Leslie / Clarke & Leslie Songs, Inc, 1926. Folio sheet music, illustrated color pictorial cover with portrait of Sammy Clark; with ukulele arrangement. Light wear and small creases; covers detached, small tears at margins, still bright and attractive. Fair to good.. A lively novelty song from the height of the Jazz Age fascination with shifting gender roles, written by lyricist Edgar Leslie and composer James V. Monaco and published in New York in 1926. The cover advertises the piece “as sung by Sammy Clark,” the vaudeville performer associated with the Clarke & Leslie publishing enterprise.The lyrics belong to a genre of Jazz Age comic songs reacting to the rapid social changes of the 1920s, when the emergence of the “flapper” produced widespread discussion about masculinity and femininity. Songs from the period often framed these developments humorously or anxiously, and “Masculine Women! Feminine Men!” reflects that tone, asking in its subtitle, “Which is the rooster? Which is the hen?”—a joking reference to perceived reversals of traditional gender roles. Although written as a satirical commentary on contemporary manners rather than as an explicit statement about sexuality, the song later acquired an association with LGBTQ+ audiences and performers. In later decades it was revived and performed in drag and cabaret contexts, where its playful questioning of gender presentation resonated with queer performance traditions. OCLC 316862641, finding copies at Baylor and Penn State.