Street cries can easily be likened to branding motifs – Intel being perhaps the most concise one of our time. Some were really short and not much too them while others were actually published or reworked all during the baroque period into arias and ditties for all sorts of settings. A woman named Gibbs (at the time) who I knew a bit – we are in the late 60s compiled these street cries and if memory serves me i think she found something like 140 of them.

Richard makes a good point about “Wait for the wagon” although there is some evidence that it was used in a minstrel show(s) in New Orleans in the 1840s and the publication date is most certainly after the composition and first performances. Wasn’t the composer Buckley or something like that?

Anyway, this is a good topic. As someone who paid for his grad school books by writing jingles (Crestview Farms Milk was a classic – move over Bach) this entire area is ripe for a book. You might look in the archives of musicology..i think the late 1980s for an article where someone tackled some of your ideas.

Good work.

Jake @ Tractor Beam Marketing

“Rough on Rats”, published 1882, promoted the “Rough on Rats” brand of
rat poison. No doubt it was sponsored.

Original sheet music:

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/S?ammem/mussm:@OR(@field(TITLE+@od1(Rough+on+rats++))+@field(ALTTITLE+@od1(Rough+on+rats++)))

More links:

http://thevirtualdimemuseum.blogspot.com/2008/05/1880s-rough-on-rats-advertisement-sheet.html

http://www.hagley.org/library/exhibits/patentmed/items/roughonrats.html