Waltzing Matilda in swing from World War 2 is this week’s Phantom Dancer feature.

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

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WALTZING

Waltzing Matilda is a bush ballad described as Australia’s unofficial national anthem.

The title was Australian slang for travelling on foot (waltzing, from German ‘auf der Walz’) with one’s belongings in a “matilda” (swag) slung over one’s back.

The song tells the story of an itinerant worker, or “swagman”, making a drink of billy tea (the lyrics sung today come from a 1903 re-writing of the original 1895 lyric, to sell Billy Tea) at a bush camp and capturing a stray jumbuck (sheep) to eat.

When the jumbuck’s owner, a squatter (grazier who stole the land from the Aboriginal people and colonial governments), and three troopers (mounted policemen) pursue the swagman for theft, he declares “You’ll never catch me alive!” and commits suicide by drowning himself in a nearby billabong (watering hole), after which his ghost haunts the site.

The original lyrics were composed in 1895 by Australian poet, Banjo Paterson, to suit a tune played by Christina Macpherson. In 1903, Marie Cowan changed some of the lyrics, wrote a completely new variation of the tune and published this as sheet music.

The song was first recorded in 1926 as performed by John Collinson and Russell Callow. There are more recordings of “Waltzing Matilda” than any other Australian song.

MATILDA

The song was first performed on 6 April 1895 by Sir Herbert Ramsay, 5th Bart., at the North Gregory Hotel in Winton, Queensland.

The occasion was a banquet for the Premier of Queensland.

A search of hundreds of Australian newspaper titles between 1895 and 1901 reveals only one report of it being sung. However, the cultural critic, A.A. Phillips, born in 1900, recalled being taught it in his childhood.

COPYRIGHT

Paterson sold the rights to Waltzing Matilda and some other pieces to Angus & Robertson for five pounds. In 1903, tea trader James Inglis hired Marie Cowan, who was married to Inglis’s accountant, to alter the song lyrics for use as an advertising jingle for the Billy Tea company, making it nationally famous.

Although no copyright applied to the song in Australia and many other countries, the Australian Olympic organisers had to pay royalties to an American publisher, Carl Fischer Music, following the song being played at the 1996 Summer Olympics held in Atlanta.

According to some reports, the song was copyrighted by Carl Fischer Music in 1941 as an original composition.

However, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Carl Fischer Music had collected the royalties on behalf of Messrs Allan and Co, an Australian publisher that claimed to have bought the original copyright, though Allan’s claim “remains unclear”.

Arrangements such as those claimed by Richard D. Magoffin remain in copyright in America. Here’s Johnny Cash singing it…