Purchasing information Notice for leaders/bass players
Length: approx. 3 mins.
A worthy successor to
A Black Bawl (1905),
The Watermelon Trust has many similarities to its predecessor. It too, is a well-crafted composition in AABBCCDD form with a 4-bar introduction. The strains are lively and contrast well with one another. When performed as scored it leaves this editor with a feeling that it has been artificially shortened and somehow just begs for a repeat of the A- and B-strains, a device that Thompson used in
A Black Bawl. Please experiment!
The Watermelon Trust was dedicated to Coates and Grundy. The cover of the original sheet music shows a solemn Negro field labourer distributing ear-to-ear watermelon portions to happy Piccaninnies.
The Watermelon Trust was published by
Barron and Thompson, New York, USA.
A tempo of 180 crotchets/min. is suggested.
