 The emergence of a distinct music hall style can be credited to a fusion of musical influences . Music hall songs needed to gain and hold the attention of an often jaded and unruly urban audience . In America , from the 1840s , Stephen Foster had reinvigorated folk song with the admixture of Negro spiritual to produce a new type of popular song . Songs like " Old Folks at Home " ( 1851 ) and " Oh , Dem Golden Slippers " ( James Bland , 1879 ) spread round the globe , taking with them the idiom and appurtenances of the minstrel song . Other influences on the rapidly developing music hall idiom were Irish and European music , particularly the jig , polka , and waltz . 
