Accompanied recitations of poetry or dramatic texts, most often for spoken voice and piano, became very popular in the nineteenth century as an after dinner entertainment.
The genre was often looked down on as something for authors and composers of lesser stature, though there are examples by Robert Schumann (Ballads for Declaration, 1850s)[1] and Richard Strauss (Enoch Arden (1897).
[2] The English composer Stanley Hawley made many such settings, some of which were performed at the first season (1895) of the Henry Wood Proms in London.
While they almost disappeared in the 1970s, that decade saw several of the biggest recitation songs of all time: Red Sovine's sentimental ode to an ill child "Teddy Bear" and C. W. McCall's truck-driving saga "Convoy", both songs hitting number one on the country charts and even crossing over into the pop market.
McCall, who did not sing, became a popular country star in the 1970s with a string of recitations, most of them comic, although his last hit, 1977's "Roses for Mama" was a sentimental tale in the best Sovine tradition.