Lily of Laguna

Lily of Laguna is a British coon song, a love song that originally included a racist and stereotyped image of black people. It was written in 1898 by English composer Leslie Stuart. It was a music hall favourite, performed notably by blackface performers such as Eugene Stratton and G. H. Elliott. By the 1930s it was stripped of its overtly racist lyrics to become a pure love song and continued to be popular into the 1950s.

The song was first performed in Oxford in July 1898, and first reviewed in the Entr'acte on 23 July 1898.Laguna of the original song was a village of Native American cave-dwellers somewhere "100 miles off the main line en route to California proceeding from New Orleans."Lily was a cave-dwelling Indian girl. The song stood aside from Stuart's other works, in part because Stuart wrote both the music and the verses. Stuart wrote that "I wrote the words and music together to a large degree and, consequently, I was able to get effects that the canons of art lay down as being impossible... Instead of ending where, say, the average poet would compel me by the metre of his verse I, writing my own lyrics, add two bars more and get an entirely new effect". The verse section contain a dramatic mood shift of iii minor, to ii minor, to I Major. The arrangement has a oboe obligato play the tune of Lily's call to her flock on her shepherdess's pipe.

The song was regularly played throughout the rest of Stuart's life, although not as frequently as less demanding compositions. On the night of Stuart's death, 26 March 1928, it was performed by Herman Darewski band at the Coliseum Theatre, with Queen Soraya of Afghanistan in attendance.

A reaction to overtly racist lyrics in coon song began to take place in the twentieth century and Bing Crosby and Mary Martin performed a less racially offensive version of this song in 1941 which is primarily based on the chorus of the original song, i.e., "She's my lady love". The song was transformed in a number of ways: the racial imagery was replaced with lines referencing sailors, ships, docks, and lollipops; the entire verse sections which, in the original, contains the dramatic mood shift was updated to the jazzy big band sound that was popular at the time; and a woman (Mary Martin) now sang lyrics from the female perspective.

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