The genius of verse and song whose life was a Book of Job

As a former treble chorister — you should have heard my ‘Benedictus’ solo from Gounod’s Messe du Sacré Coeur! — I love singing, especially popular ditties. I sing to my latest granddaughter, Daisy, that clever song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. She cannot talk yet but is almost walking, and she wriggles to it rhythmically, so I call her the Cairo belly-dancer. The period 1880 to 1914 was the first golden age of popular songs, most of them British, the best of which my mother used to sing to me when I was tiny. I used to know all the words of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, though that of course was an American song, written and composed by Irving Berlin, born in Russia as Israel Baline, who became Berlin after a misprint in his first published score. Berlin, I gather, was not a likeable character (mean) and not much of a musician either, though the son of a cantor; he could not read music and could play the piano only in F sharp.