"Boiled Beef and Carrots" is a comedic music hall song published in 1909. It was composed by Charles Collins and Fred Murray. The song was made famous by

Harry Champion William Henry Crump (17 April 1865 – 14 January 1942), better known by the stage name Harry Champion, was an English music hall composer, singer and comedian, whose onstage persona appealed chiefly to the working class communities of Ea ...

who sang it as part of his act and later recorded it. The song extols the virtues of a typical English, and particularly

Cockney Cockney is an accent and dialect of English, mainly spoken in London and its environs, particularly by working-class and lower middle-class Londoners. The term "Cockney" has traditionally been used to describe a person from the East End, or ...

, dish. Chorus: "Derby Kell" is old

Cockney rhyming slang Rhyming slang is a form of slang word construction in the English language. It is especially prevalent among Cockneys in England, and was first used in the early 19th century in the East End of London; hence its alternative name, Cockney rhymin ...

for belly ("Derby Kelly"). "Blow out your kite" means "fill your stomach". It uses the word ''kite'' (also ''kyte''), a dialect word, originally derived from an

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

word for the womb which, by extension, came to mean the belly.''Oxford English Dictionary'', 2nd edition, 1989, vol. VIII, p. 471.

References

{{authority control British pop songs Comedy songs 1909 songs Music hall songs Songs with music by Charles Collins (songwriter)

See also

References