Recordings Īmong the earliest commercial recordings were those by the tenors Lambert Murphy in 1917, Ernest Pike in 1918 and John McCormack in 1919. Souviens-toi ça parlait de la Picardie, Et des roses qu'on trouve là-bas, Tous les deux amoureux nous avons dansé Sur les roses de ce temps-là. The following words for its refrain are taken from the recording by Yves Montand: Dire que cet air nous semblait vieillot, Aujourd'hui il me semble nouveau, Et puis surtout c'était toi et moi, Ces deux mots ne vieillissent pas. There is also a French version of the song under the title of 'Dansons la Rose'. And she sees the road by the poplars, Where they met in the bygone years, For the first little song of the roses Is the last little song she hears: Roses are shining in Picardy, in the hush of the silver dew, Roses are flowering in Picardy, but there's never a rose like you! And the roses will die with the summertime, and our roads may be far apart, But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy! 'tis the rose that I keep in my heart!Īnd the years fly on for ever, Till the shadows veil their skies, But he loves to hold her little hands, And look in her sea-blue eyes. And a song stirs in the silence, As the wind in the boughs above, She listens and starts and trembles, 'Tis the first little song of love: She is watching by the poplars, Colinette with the sea-blue eyes, She is watching and longing and waiting Where the long white roadway lies. The following lyric is taken from the sheet music published in 1916: Following the war, the singing of the song helped soldiers who were suffering from shell shock to regain their powers of speech.

During the First World War, the song sold at a rate of 50,000 copies of the sheet music per month, earning Haydn Wood approximately £10,000 in total (£518,252 in 2022 adjusted for inflation). The song quickly became popular throughout Britain, with British soldiers singing it when they enlisted for the Front in France and Flanders. This area contained the Somme battlefields – the scene of some of the fiercest fighting during the First World War. Picardy was a historical province of France which stretched from north of Noyon to Calais via the whole of the Somme department and the north of the Aisne department. Weatherly travelled in France visiting the Rhone valley and Chamonix. The exact story that lies behind the words of the song is unclear, but in his 1926 memoirs, Weatherly suggested that it concerned a love affair of one of his close friends. He jumped off the bus and wrote down the refrain on an old envelope while standing under a street lamp. Wood related that, as he was going home one night on the top of a London bus, the melody came to him. The composer Haydn Wood wrote the music for over 200 ballads, of which 'Roses of Picardy' became his most popular. Her singing of his compositions resulted in his writing two of the most popular hits of the 20th-century ' Danny Boy' (1910) and 'Roses of Picardy'.

The lyricist Fred Weatherly had become impressed with beauty of the voice of the soprano Elsie Griffin, who later became a leading artiste with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

A sea of roses lyrics