Lakes

This week’s Great Lake headline sent us hunting for a fitting protest song — turns out nobody in the 1910s was singing about who gets to name a body of water. So instead, Three Tune Tuesday goes looking for what people actually did put on record about lakes: three love songs, recorded across 35 years, all built around the same setting — a lake, a couple, and moonlight — put to three completely different uses.

We start with “Moonlight on the Lake,” a genteel 1878 parlor ballad recorded by the Peerless Quartet — the kind of thing a family once sang around the piano, long before it reached a phonograph. Next, Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water” (1909), performed by soprano Florence Hinkle — a concert-hall art song built from real fieldwork among Omaha and Winnebago communities, and later, oddly enough, a beer commercial jingle. We close with “Row, Row, Row” (1912–13), Arthur Collins’s Ziegfeld Follies novelty hit about a couple out on a rowboat who may or may not be behaving themselves. Genteel, elevated, and mischievous — three very different ways early-20th-century America fell in love beside the water, decades before anyone thought to put a country’s name on the lake itself.