My Regular Girl Is a Regular Feller (And I’m Her Regular Beau). Novelty Song

New York: M. Witmark & Sons, 1919. Folio sheet music, 3 pp. plus pictorial cover (4 pp. total). Near fine with light general wear and minor handling marks.. A lively Tin Pan Alley novelty song written and performed by the vaudeville duo Dannie O’Neil and Jimmie Foley, whose studio portraits appear prominently on the cover. The design places their photograph against a decorative field of bold red flowers and deep blue foliage, a bright, poster-like arrangement characteristic of Witmark’s visually striking sheet music covers of the late 1910s. The cover explicitly advertises the piece as “written and sung by” O’Neil and Foley, reflecting the common Tin Pan Alley practice of promoting songs through the touring stage performers who introduced them.

The comic title plays on contemporary slang. In early twentieth-century usage a “regular feller” suggested a dependable or easygoing companion; applied to a woman, the phrase humorously casts the girlfriend as “one of the boys,” a playful nod to the companionate style of modern courtship emerging in the years just after World War I. The balancing phrase “and I’m her regular beau” restores the expected romantic pairing, a typical vaudeville comic device that briefly toys with gender expectations before settling back into familiar roles. Three copies in OCLC, with a fourth mistitled at Mississippi State, none in commerce at the time of writing.