Pasting new lyrics onto the tune of "Three Blind Mice," and taking the unusual step of interrupting the song with a mock Union walkout toward the end, this is a merry slap at the burgeoning labor movement that was changing
the working world in the early 20th Century. Jack Norworth, one of the bigger names in Music Hall around 1908, had written "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" as well as co-authored "Shine On Harvest Moon" with his wife Nora Bayes.
He performs here on a Pathé disc recorded about eleven years later, in 1919. Those in his audience who found Unionization confusing, and maybe a little threatening, no doubt enjoyed this song (though others might not have been
entertained). The composer is not credited, nor are the other voices that come in near the end -- that spoken banter is faint at times, so I bumped the volume up a bit and changed the noise reduction settings for this part to
make the spoken section more audible.
