Leon Rosselson Song Catalogue
  • Home
  • 1960s
  • 1970s
  • 1980s
  • 1990s
  • 2000s
  • 2010s
  • Childrens songs
  • Songbooks
  • Song list
  • Co written songs
  • Stragglers
  • Contact

Don't Get Married Girls

One of Leon's most celebrated/notorious songs, "Don't Get Married Girls" implores women not to trap themselves in life-long union with men who, in Leon's take, are invariably self-centred, dull and exploitative. The song inevitably met with mixed reactions when performed in clubs and pubs, but recalls a time when the feminist movement had a genuine momentum, and thanks in part to its sense of humour, is one of his more popular.

The first known recording is not by Leon, but by Gary & Vera Aspey, whose live version was included on their 1976 LP, A Taste Of Hotpot (Topic 12TS299). A year later it was recorded and released by Leon on Love, Loneliness, Laundry, and has since been re-recorded by him (with a minor tweak in the lyric) both in the studio and on stage.

“As I think songwriters have some responsibility to catch the spirit of the times, I wrote this song, drawn from observation and some personal experience, which had quite a vogue for a time. It was featured in a TV programme about Fringe Theatre songs, sung in music hall style by Liz Mansfield, who was at that time in the Red Ladder Theatre Company, and recorded in a miners’ club in Yorkshire. The women seemed to relish the performance; the miners looked distinctly uncomfortable.” -  LR (sleevenotes to The World Turned Upside Down (CD box set), p24)


Recordings

Cover version (1976) 
  • A Taste of Hotpot     Live recording by Gary & Vera Aspey

Version 1 (1977)
  • Love Loneliness Laundry
  • Rosselsongs
  • The World Turned Upside Down

Cover version (2005) 
  • And They All Sang Rosselsongs    By Elizabeth Mansfield

Version 2 (2010)
  • The Liberty Tree

Version 3 (2011)  Live performance, released in 2014
  • No Gods No Masters   


Sheet music

  • That's Not the Way It's Got To Be     p40
  • Bringing the News from Nowhere     p10

Proudly powered by Weebly