AMERICAN SONG-SHEET | A curious American song-sheet coupling a mourning song for George Washington with the another sentimental song of loss

AMERICAN SONG-SHEET

LADY WASINGTON'S [SIC] LAMENTATION. AND THE WANDERING BOYS OF SWITSERLAND [SIC]. PROVIDENCE: PRINTED AND SOLD AT NO. 25, HIGH STREET, WHERE ARE KEPT FOR SALE 200 OTHER KINDS, [CA. 1810–1812]

Letterpress broadside (10 3/8 x 9 in.; 267 x 230 mm), four lines of headline, text in two columns; chipped and creased at margins, foxed.

The anonymous "Lady Washington's Lamentation for the Death of her Husband" (printed here with a truncated title), was quite popular in the decades after the first president's death. The song contained ten four-line verses, each with a repeated chorus. The final verse is representative of the song's poetic merit: "But why with my own single grief so confounded? | When my country's sad millions in sorrow are wounded! | Let me mingle the current, which flows from my bosom, With my country's vast ocean of tears and there lose 'em! Though my Washington! Though my Washington! Though my Washington! has forsaken us!" (Although written in the first person, it is unlikely that Martha Washington was the author.)

The present carelessly printed sheet appends to the popular elegy of Washington Isaac Pocock's lugubrious "Wandering Boys of Switzerland." 

Shaw & Shoemaker cite several other editions of "Lady Washington's Lamentation," but the only record of the present printing seems to be the appearance of this, or another, copy in a Parke-Bernet catalogue, 22 February 1961, lot 492.