Always look under the Bed

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"My mother said, always look under the bed,

Before you blow the candle out, to see if there's a man about.

I always do, but you can make a bet,

It's never been my luck to find a man there yet!"

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This is one song of which I would love to have the sheet music.

I have a recording of the song but it's not the same as having a paper copy.

It was sung and recorded by Nellie Wallace in 1929, which is why I would like a copy of the music.

She was born in Glasgow in 1870, and made her first appearance as a clog dancer at the Steam Clock Music Hall, Birmingham in 1882.

In 1910 she was on the opening bill at the London Palladium, by which time she was an established star

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She was British Music Hall's greatest grotesque comedienne and was often billed as "The Essence of Eccentricity".

Nellie's music hall character was a spinster with buck teeth and heavily drawn eyebrows who wore an ill-fitting tweed suit, a hat with one feather protruding at the top, and a fur which she referred to as 'me little bit of vermin'. Her exaggerated dress sense, bordering on the grotesque, made her one of the few women who appeared successfully as a pantomime dame."

Her song..."Always look under the Bed" seems to be based on an earlier version called, "The Old Maid and the Burglar Man", which goes....

I'll sing you a song of a burglar man, who started to rob a house.

He crept in at the window, as silently as a mouse.

While thinking of all the treasures he'd get, while under the bed he lay;

About nine o'clock he saw a sight that would make your hair turn grey.

About nine o'clock an old maid came in, "I am so tired she said".

Thinking everything was fine and all right, she forgot to look under the bed.

She took out her teeth, her old glass eye, and the hair from the top of her head;

The burglar man had forty-one fits when came from under the bed.

She stood there quiet, she stood there still, she stood there meek as a lamb.

"Dear Lord, my prayers have been answered at last, for at least I have found me a man!"

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YouTube has a sound recording with pictures from a silent short of Pathe series "Stars At Home"

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