Don’t Always Judge Sheet Music By Its Cover (Or Cover Price)

Because we need another van-load full of old paper like some of you need the Mets to win or whatever, we just bought-out the ephemera inventory of a local antiques dealer. Among the many boxes, vintage sheet music — hundreds & hundreds of pieces of old sheet music.

Sheet Music: Father of the Land We Love

Normally the most interesting thing to me about sheet music is the cover art, but sometimes the best thing about sheet music is not the art at all. Like this vintage sheet music featuring a painting by James Montgomery Flagg of George Washington in uniform atop a white horse with a map of the United States behind him — no offense to the artist, but it’s not anything I want on my wall.

Surprisingly, there were two copies of this sheet music — with the thousands of songs written and published, it seems odd to find multiple pieces of old sheet music in the same boxes.

I’ll be honest, I likely wouldn’t have paid much attention to either of these copies of 1931’s “Father of the Land We Love, Written for the American People by George M. Cohan to Commemorate the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of George Washington” — except for that one of them had these stickers on the protective cover sheet.

Price Stickers on Vintage Sheet Music

You’ll see that the first copy has a sticker with what looks like $25 changed to $15, the second or lower sticker reads, “Valued $50.00 in Book.” (Interestingly, the second piece of sheet music was in better condition, had a price tag of $25 which had not been lowered, but did not have any sticker boasting of its higher value.)

Now I don’t know what book that sticker was referring to (or when it was written and/or published), but I do believe that the dealer I bought all this old ephemera from was an honest one and that such a price was once noted for this commemorative sheet music. However, the times (always a changin’) have likely been impacted by trends both in terms of less public interest and the invention of the Internet which has shown the item to be not as rare as once thought… It’s the same Internet which now reflects the resulting lower sales price. (Something documented in the lowered price on the first sales sticker too).

But I was curious as to what might have made the sheet music so valuable — when you own not one but two copies a bit of greed does enter the picture. *wink* So I did a little research…

As stated, Father of the Land We Love was written by
George Michael Cohan (of patriotic Over There fame) for the celebration of George Washington’s 200th birthday in 1932. The sheet music was issued by the United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission in 1931 and the six pages include a one page biography of Washington and six smaller prints depicting events and locations important to Washington.

The copyright does not belong to Cohan. This isn’t too surprising; publishers often owned & controlled copyrights at this time. But no publisher is noted and so I expected to see that the copyright belonged to the George Washington Bicentennial Commission — or the US government. But instead the copyright (1931) is designated as belonging to one Sol Bloom.

Sol was then Congressman Bloom and the Chairman of the Bicentennial Commission on the birth of George Washington. Bloom was an expert on copyright — but not just because he was a congressman. He was Sol Bloom The Music Man, a man who’d become very wealthy for having pioneered the selling of sheet music by mail. He would later go into real estate & design the modern folding theater seat, both of which would add to his wealth, but isn’t it interesting that good old Sol secured himself the copyright to a government project.

Oh, I’m sure Sol’s heart was in the right place… He had, after all, donated his profits before. But Sol Bloom was a promoter. Not only did he make a name and reputation for himself for supposedly coining the term “belly dancing” and writing the tune Hootchy Kootchy for the dancers to dance to, but even years later he still knew the value of promotion — as evidenced by this article in Time August 10, 1931 which covers the story of Bloom and Cohan presenting President Hoover with the song:

As President Hoover, no musician, took the sheet and glanced over it, Congressman Bloom hurried on to explain that he was not trying to “plug” the song by White House publicity because “Father of the Land We Love” was not to be sold commercially but was to be distributed free throughout the land by the Federal Commission for 1932 singing. However, after leaving the President’s office, Mr. Bloom stopped in the White House press room, stepped up beside a bust of George Washington, and began to sing the first verse

I still don’t know what was supposed to put that heavy value of $50 on this sheet music… My guess is that this sheet music would have been widely distributed and so not all that rare, despite it’s appeal to sheet music collectors, fans of Cohan, and collectors of political items.  But maybe Sol Bloom did something unknown… Like some unseen hand of the secondary marketplace he’s done what he can to shore up his copyright claims.

Wherever he is, I’m sure he wants his cut of whatever it’s worth.