Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
My dear friend Graham wrote this wildly charming song cycle called, "English as She Is Spoke" based on a book by a Portuguese-English phrase book written by an author who, remarkably, spoke no English.
With the help of a pair of dictionaries, Pedro Carolino (the unknowing librettist of this piece) translated a series of expressions from his native Portuguese into French and from French into English.
The result is a set of poems with unintentional hilarity, even praised by Mark Twain for its "miraculous stupidities."
Twain continues,
"In this world of uncertainties, there is, at any rate, one thing which may be pretty confidently set down as a certainty: and that is, that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the English language lasts. Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naïvete are as supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare's sublimities."
And so, my friend Graham decided that the delicious ridiculousness needed to be put to music.
This video is a result of several months of learning on my part, and several years in the making for Graham, and I am truly honored to be the first to interpret it.
Here are where all the songs sit in the video so you can skip around and listen to your favorites:
0:18 The Walk
4:11 For to Ride a Horse
7:41 The Field
10:34 The Books and Of the Reading
13:32 The Weather
If you need to get your hands on this sheet music or any other composition this wonderful man has written, click either of these two links to get your very own copy:
sheetmusicplus.com/en/explore?q=graham+yates
jwpepper.com/sheet-music/search.jsp?setStickyDepartment=true&suggested&departmentDescriptions&keywords=graham+yates
If you want to hear more of his music, go subscribe to him on YouTube:
youtube.com/@grahamyatespianist
My dear friend Graham wrote this wildly charming song cycle called, "English as She Is Spoke" based on a book by a Portuguese-English phrase book written by an author who, remarkably, spoke no English.
With the help of a pair of dictionaries, Pedro Carolino (the unknowing librettist of this piece) translated a series of expressions from his native Portuguese into French and from French into English.
The result is a set of poems with unintentional hilarity, even praised by Mark Twain for its "miraculous stupidities."
Twain continues,
"In this world of uncertainties, there is, at any rate, one thing which may be pretty confidently set down as a certainty: and that is, that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the English language lasts. Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naïvete are as supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare's sublimities."
And so, my friend Graham decided that the delicious ridiculousness needed to be put to music.
This video is a result of several months of learning on my part, and several years in the making for Graham, and I am truly honored to be the first to interpret it.
Here are where all the songs sit in the video so you can skip around and listen to your favorites:
0:18 The Walk
4:11 For to Ride a Horse
7:41 The Field
10:34 The Books and Of the Reading
13:32 The Weather
If you need to get your hands on this sheet music or any other composition this wonderful man has written, click either of these two links to get your very own copy:
sheetmusicplus.com/en/explore?q=graham+yates
jwpepper.com/sheet-music/search.jsp?setStickyDepartment=true&suggested&departmentDescriptions&keywords=graham+yates
If you want to hear more of his music, go subscribe to him on YouTube:
youtube.com/@grahamyatespianist
