sheet music

As I’ve often said, normally the most interesting thing to me about vintage sheet music is the cover art; this because I’m so musically illiterate that the only way I am able to carry a tune is to buy sheet music *ba dum dum* But did you know that inside the cute collectible covers, there’s actually music?!

And sometimes, the very best music is hiding under very plain, boring, wraps. Seriously, these covers are nearly blank (save for some fonts hubby would identify for me — if I cared to let him handle my vintage sheet music), but I’m fascinated anyway.

I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle

This copy of Jingle Jangle Jingle is proof that my mom, who sang parts of this song, wasn’t as nuts as I thought. I guess if I watched any classic Westerns, I’d have heard of it; but that’s not my genre. And now I know, should a music trivia contest break-out any time soon, that this song was not written by Gene Autry but by Frank Loesser (music by Joseph J. Lilley).

(And while I’m being so particular, I’d like to note that I was at first incensed that some idiot had yard-sale tagged it with a 75 cents sticker; but it appears that the sticker is original, a way to mark-up the price from 60 cents.)

Before we go any further, I should clarify: When I say “the very best music”, I mean in terms of collecting stories and discoveries. Like I said, I can’t read a note of it and even if I could, I’m no music expert — but I sure do know words. Lyrics. Good stories. Or bad stories, as the case may be. For sometimes, that bland manila paper cloaks some serious racism. Double the “OMG” (Oh My God) points when the racist tunes were formerly the property of a nun. (To be fair, Sister Patricia also owned this cheeky little naughty clock song. I’m not sure that makes things ‘better’… But at least I’m being completely truthful, so spare me the ruler, Sister.)

Ham-ing It Up With Vintage Sheet Music

Another such “goody” I would have missed if I had merely been waiting for fetching cover art to catch my fancy is Ham & Eggs, by John Martin:

When the borders hear the dinner bell
And gather ’round the table;
They eat whatever they are served
As fast as they are able;
Roast beef, veal, or corn beef hash
Stewed prunes and a cup of tea
Is the bill of fare at the boarding house
But here’s the bill for me.

Chrous:
H-A-M and eggs, there’s nothing in the world can beat;
They go to the spot whenever I long for something good to eat
The Dutchman loves his sauer kraut
And the Frenchman fried frogs legs;
But when I’m hungry, what I want is H-A-M and eggs.

When I take my girl to a swell cafe
And ask “what are you eating?”
She answers “Oysters and Champagne”
Lord, how my heart starts beating;
I’ve just got one dollar bill
And I’m in an awful stew;
So I tell the waiter to bring us on
Some ham and eggs for two.

(Chorus)

My mother in law was very sick
We thot that she was dying
And every body in the room
(Excepting me) was crying.
But she’s up and ’round to day
Strong as ever on her legs;
For they brought her back from the very grave
With a dish of Ham and Eggs.

(Chorus)

When I got married years ago
My wife was quite good looking;
But we were nearly starved, because,
She was no good at cooking;
So I bought some Ham and Eggs
Put ‘em on the frying pan,
From that day all my trouble ceased
And I’m a happy man.

(Don’t forget the big chorus finish now!)

I guess when they said it was a “Comic Male Quartette” they weren’t kidding.

The cover also boasts that “Every Quartette Should Have This Fine New Number In Their Repertoire. A GREAT ENCORE NUMBER” For some reason I want to get a hold of the writers at Scrubs and see if they want a copy of this tune so that Ted’s Band can sing it.

Then again, why not ask the actual cappella band themselves. They’re called The Blanks, and you can’t get much more full circle than that when you started out talking about rather blank sheet music, can you?

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.

Antique Organ

Being an engineering type, my collections are practical, antique tool makers gages, not capable of holding today’s manufacturing tolerances, cameras that require film that’s impossible to find, and depression glass ice buckets, too precious to use when having guests over.

I don’t consider the glass door knobs I’ve gathered and still must install as added decoration on our interior doors to be a collection. Nor can you describe the stained glass windows purchased at various garage sales and antique stores now displayed in several rooms in our home a collection. That’s because each was selected both for their aesthetics and for their physical dimensions as they had to fit into the area we had for them.

But while my collections are logical and Wifey’s come close to being reasonable, I often find zero logic in what others collect. Making that confession, I stand the risk of hearing back from other passionate people with obscure, offbeat possessions they have stacked neatly on shelves or piled high in every nook and cranny of their hut.

And who needs to collect auto door lock buttons from 1950s model American cars, trying to acquire all the colors available those years?   And how do you display hog watering troughs?    Does anyone serve guests on restaurant ware dishes?    Can you explain someone’s desire to accumulate airline barf bags?

If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would have been skeptical of anyone collecting bathtubs but there they sat in front of a farm house about eight claw foots in a row.

I even have trouble understanding barb wire collectors, but it might be a bias based on all the scratches I have suffered just handling that stuff.

Who needs more than one, maybe two, ice buckets? OH WAIT, that’s my collection. DAH.

And who feeds these fervent collectors? “Guilty as Charged.” I do buy and resell any and all of the most obscure and odd items I can find and you can bet some person has a desire for those very items. (Hopefully two collectors looking at our Ebay site at the same time.)

Now if you need to fill in the blank with your own oddity, you can be sure you’re not alone. If it can be seen or touched, it is in someone’s collection.

Good Hunting on your own quest.

In October 1883, Theodore Presser began publishing The Etude, a magazine of music for experts and students. Presser had studied music and led university department for years, but wished to spread the love and understanding of music beyond the conservatory and university. With $250, Presser started publishing his music magazine and almost immediately had to expand to larger facilities to keep up with the demand.

The Etude was published into the 1960s, and reflected the times it spanned. The earlier issues were primairly classically-focused, but as tastes and technology changed, Presser’s magazine evolved to include jazz, ragtime, modern composers, and encompass new technologies from the phonograph to radio to television. This progression is what appeals most to a non-musician like myself. While I wouldn’t pass up a copy of Radio Guide and its articles on performers and music, The Etude has always seemed a bit more stuffy and mechanical. While The Etude does include a good amount of training and technique, the magazines are usually quite readable. There are often articles on the quality of music itself, profiles on the lives of composers and performers, and stories about how instruments are made or advents in new technology as it applies to music. There’s a surprising amount of overlap between The Etudes of the 1930s and Radio Guides from the 1930s — their focus may be different, but record collectors like myself won’t be disappointed by the articles of this period.

An obvious crossover are the sheet-music collectors; while much of the appeal of sheet-music tends to be the cover art, amateur and professional musicians alike do collect sheet-music for the songs within. Each The Etude usually has 5 to 10 pages of sheet music inside, arranged piano. The amount of music sadly declines in later years. Each issue usually has several short tunes in a variety of genres; these genres change as time passes, but largely remain classical, or at least ‘music-schooly’ in that the 1950s issues don’t include Frank Sinatra tunes.

Another of my favorite part of these magazines are the advertisements — ads for player pianos, music schools, and girdles figure prominently in early The Etude, with radios and phonographs picking up prominence through the 1920s and 30s, then to tape recorders, amplifiers, and electric organs into the 1950s and beyond. The interior pages, sadly, were largely black-and-white, although the outside back cover was usually in color. The Etude’s covers changed in style as well over the years — in the beginning, each issue was page-numbered by volume, but this practice diminished by the 1920s and the magazine began to look more like a modern magazine. Earlier magazines measured 13-1/2″ x 10-1/2″ but in the early 1940s the format changed to a sheet-music-like 9-1/2″ x 12″. In my opinion, the cover art through the 1930s was the best of the magazine; after the smaller format change, covers were still creative, but by the 1950s covers seemed to use more clip-art, photos, and classic paintings. Before the 1920s, only the January issue had a cover, as the rest of the year was expected to be bound into a single edition.

Having all the resources of a publisher, Presser began to release sheetmusic, which, of course, had prime advertising placement in The Etude; The Theodore Presser Company he founded still exists today, continuing to publish the music of new and classic composers. The Etude may not be still published, but so many issues were sent out to schools, independent music teachers, and music afficianados, they are quite common at auctions and estate sales. Whether you are a musician, or just a dedicated listener, you shouldn’t pass up a pile of The Etude: you’ll probably find something more interesting than you think.

“we must all own up that without Les Paul, generations of flash punks like us would be in jail or cleaning toilets.” Keith Richards

Music is such a major part of every day life, is it any wonder that collecting some aspect of this category reaches almost everyone. Name a household without a CD assortment or MP3 player, vinyl, tapes, sheet music, or musical instruments. Some of us have old Victrolas, radios, cassette players, tape players, or record decks when the collection is vintage. (My old radio doesn’t play old music)

Our affection for one form or another leads us to idolize the music makers, a particular genre, era or the instruments played.

Every so often an artist comes along with a lasting impact on a vast portion of the field of music and therefore creates collectibles for so many separate categories. Les Paul, a 92 year old performer, inventor, and innovator is such a person.

Every Monday night, the great guitarist carries his 92-year-old body and his 44-year-old Gibson onstage at the Iridium Jazz Club at 51st and Broadway in New York City. Still introduced as “The Wizard of Waukesha,” he does two shows – one at 8, one at 10 – in the basement nightclub.

In 1978 Les Paul and Mary Ford were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame as recognition for their achievements. He also received a Grammy Trustee Award for lifetime achievements in 1983.

In 1988 Les was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Les Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall Of Fame in 2005 for his development of the solid-body electric guitar.

In 2006, he was inducted into the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He was also named an honorary member of the Audio Engineering Society.

He is a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar which made the sound of rock and roll possible. His many recording innovations include over dubbing, delay – such as sound on sound and tape delay, phasing effects and multi-track recording.

We only need to dig out the old vinyl of recordings with then wife Mary Ford, to hear examples of his innovative styling on records like Bye Bye Blues, How High the Moon, Hummingbird, Just Because, Tennessee Waltz, The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise & Vaya Con Dios.

Les had an early start in music before he played guitar he played piano. By 13, Les was performing semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist.

At the age of 17, Les played with Rube Tronson’s Cowboys. Soon after, he dropped out of high school to join Wolverton’s Radio Band in St. Louis, then moved to Chicago. His first records were released in 1936. Unsatified with the sound of electric guitars, he was experimenting with sound in the 1930s.

Later moving to California 1n the early 40s and working with greats like Nat King Cole, The Andrew Sisters and on Bing Crosby’s radio Show.

Les hosted a 15-minute radio program, The Les Paul Show, on NBC in 1950, featuring himself, Mary Ford, and Eddie Stapleton. Several recordings of these shows survive and are prized by collectors of old time radio programs.

Les even built his own wax-cutter assembly, based on auto parts. He used the flywheel from a Cadillac for its weight and flatness. Even in these early days, he used the wax disk setup to record parts at different speeds and with delay, resulting in his signature sound with echoes and birdsong-like guitar riffs.

The Ampex company, with Bing Crosby’s backing, created the Ampex Model 200, the world’s first commercially-produced reel to reel tape recorder. Bing gave Les Paul what was only the second Model 200 to be produced and Les immediately saw its potential both for special effects, like echo, and its suitability for multi-track recording, for which he is considered the father.

Using this machine, Les developed his tape multi-track system by adding an additional recording head and extra circuitry, allowing multiple tracks to be recorded separately and asynchronously on the same tape. Paul’s invention was quickly developed by Ampex into commercially-produced two-track and three-track recorders, and these machines were the backbone of the professional recording studio, radio and TV industry in the 1950s and early 1960s.

When he later began using magnetic tape, the major change was that he could take his recording equipment on tour with him, making episodes for his 15-minute radio show in his hotel room.

When the Waukesha County Historical Society announced a preview and wine tasting event in the historical old county courthouse and jail, now run as a museum, to raise both funds and interest in the future permanent interactive exhibit of the Les Paul collection of memorabilia, we just had to attend.

We will cover the event and plans for the collection in the Friday Blog.