Product Description
"My Brother Sylvest'" also known as "Big Strong Man", is an American song, but often performed by English folk singers and Irish bands.
My Brudda Sylvest' was written in 1908, words by Jesse Lasky and Sam Stern, music by Fred Fisher.
The song is written in an Italian-American dialect about the singer's eponymous brother, described in hyperbolic terms as a man of legendary strength capable of extraordinary feats. The original lyric has him blowing out a house fire, pushing the ocean away to allow him to walk to Italy, killing fifty thousand [native American] Indians, and drinking the ocean dry.
Subsequent versions changed the references from the boxer John L. Sullivan to the "Jeffries-Johnson fight" of 1910, to American boxer Jack Dempsey, who started boxing in 1914, and even to John Conteh of Great Britain, who fought in the 1970s. Other changes have included the saving of the RMS Lusitania, sunk during the first World War, and swimming from New York to Italy, drinking all the water in the sea, playing every instrument in a brass band in a visit to Japan.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.