With the invention of YouTube and Google, sharing music is a breeze. Today you can also easily find a few lines from a poem, copy and paste the text, and dedicate it to your loved one. One of the hardest parts of sending a postcard to someone fighting in the war during the 20th century was finding a way to fit everything you wanted to say on a small piece of paper. Luckily there was a way around this conundrum which was solved with the creation of the “song postcard”. Song postcards featured popular songs, poems, hymns and much more. In Great Britain, the Bamforth Company would produce series of postcards, where if you collected the entire set you would have the chorus to a song. They also had many different themes such as romance and heartbreak and would use live models to convey these emotions. Sometimes they would use women dreaming of their lost beau or thought bubbles filled with a soldier to show that she was thinking of him. These postcards were more than just a piece of paper with some writing on it but were what kept loved ones connected. Song postcards captured the sentiment that people wanted to convey to another but could not express. These cards were also like a time capsule because we can get a sense of what sort of music, themes, and fashion were popular in the day.
Post by Arvin Ramdas