Home Sweet Home

This songbook is music history

This is a famous song for being the closing song in the WLS Barn Dance out of Chicago back in 1934 when radio programs were authentic and fostered talent and good values. Everything today is poisoned by consumerism and I'll spare you my mandatory lecture outlining the Fall of Man. This is in the piano friendly key of F major.

" 'Mid pleasures and palaces tho' we may roam,
be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

John Howard Payne wrote the lyrics in 1823 but the melody is an old Italian folk song. Payne lived a meteoric life that even dear old Oggy can not match. He acted in NY and London and then went off on a complete tangent as a kind of pacific representative of the doomed and embattled Cherokee Indian of the Southeast, and if that wasn't odd enough, he then became the American Consul to Tunis, Tunisia...because that's what happens when you write good lyrics...you become an American ambassador in Africa.

A toast to a man who had more than one life to live.