Victoria Day

This week’s Three Tune Tuesday takes us back to the origins of Victoria Day — not the long weekend, not the fireworks, but the woman herself. We open with an “On This Day” entry: “June Brought the Roses,” recorded by contralto Marcia Freer on May 19, 1924, one hundred years to the day before this episode was released — nothing to do with Queen Victoria, but everything to do with the warmth her holiday signals for Canadians. From there we travel to Montreal in 1902, where the Kilties Band of Canada pressed “The Maple Leaf Forever” onto a maroon disc with a tartan paper label for the Berliner Gramophone Company — one of the rarest and most distinctly Canadian objects the early recording industry produced. We close with the song that was Victoria herself: Ian Colquhoun’s “Soldiers of the Queen,” captured in London around 1900, the sound of an empire that believed without question in its own permanence. A New Zealand newspaper noted in 1901 that the death of Queen Victoria had rather interfered with the popularity of the song. It had. Nothing could have replaced her. Berliner Tartan Label