It started with a rare hearing of Coleridge-Taylor's violin concerto in a recent Prom. The opening bars of the second movement were very familiar. The same phrase begins a popular song of yesteryear, "Little man, you've had a busy day". Who was copying who, I wondered?
Sure enough, the song was from the 1930s and the violin concerto premiered before the Great War. The song composer might just have heard that premiere or even seen the published score. On the other hand, the opening phrase is developed differently, so that it might have come from subconscious memory rather than deliberate plagiarism, if it was not entirely a coincidence.
The big surprise for me was that the later composer was a woman, Mabel Wayne, in an era when women, if they were involved in popular music at all, contributed lyrics rather than tunes*. Further, Little man was not her only hit and her music has stood the test of time. It happened in Monterey and In a little Spanish town have remained in the middle-brow repertoire, The Bachelors had a hit with Ramona 36 years after it was first recorded and only seven years ago Eric Clapton included Little man on an album.
* Previously I had been aware only of Ann Ronell, who wrote Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf for Disney.
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