| "Juanita" | |
|---|---|
 Sheet music cover (1855) | |
| Song | |
| Published | 1855 |
| Composer | Caroline Norton |
| Lyricist | Caroline Norton |
"Juanita" ("Nita Juanita") is a love song variously subtitled "A Spanish Ballad", "A Song of Spain", and others. "Juanita" was number two of a six-song collection entitled Songs of Affection published December 1853 by Chappell & Co. and composed by noted Victorian society figure and social reformer Caroline Norton. [1] "Juanita" was the first ballad by a woman composer to achieve massive sales, [2] and its original setting (for a soprano) has been seen to be subtly subversive of gender roles (as the woman singing the song is taking the part of the wooing lover), [3] a topic of some significance to Mrs. Norton.
As composing was seen as a masculine occupation, it was typical to borrow or adapt the melodies. [3] The opening four-bar phrase of the song is taken from Handel's aria Lascia ch'io pianga from the opera Rinaldo , although the subsequent melody differs from that of the aria. The name of the song is derived from the refrains:
"Juanita" appears in numerous songbooks and has been recorded many times. Early successes were by Frank C. Stanley (1905) and by Emilio de Gogorza in 1919. [5] The song was included in the Jo Stafford and Gordon MacRae album Memory Songs (1955). A crowd of picnickers sings the song, near the 41-minute mark, in the 1955 film Picnic . Jim Reeves included the song (as "My Juanita") in his album Girls I Have Known (1958) [6] and Bing Crosby featured the song in a medley on his album 101 Gang Songs (1961).
