Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1861-1946) was the most successful songwriter – male or female – in the first half of the 20th century. Her most popular songs sold millions of copies of sheet music and records and were sung around the world, translated into dozens of languages. Critics often thought of her music either as “semi-classical,” as “high-class songs,” or, because so many millions of people sang her songs, as folk music, calling her a descendant of Stephen Foster. Americans sang her songs at weddings, funerals, and gatherings of all kinds, usually by heart. She was also an early female entrepreneur, founding her own music publishing house, designing her early sheet music covers, writing the lyrics to half of her nearly 200 songs. As a result she earned enough to build homes in Chicago, in the hills north of San Diego, and in Hollywood, where she was one of the founding cultural figures. Before Mrs. Bond began to tour as a means of promoting her songs, performing them to thousands of audiences over four decades, there was no such thing as a woman singer-songwriter. And like popular folk and rock singer-songwriters in the 1960s and later, she made no pretense of being a professional singer. Quite the contrary.

A sure measure of Bond’s broad appeal: professional singers and performers of all musical styles embraced her songs. Many leading opera singers (e.g., Ernestine Schumann-Heink and Lawrence Tibbett) promoted them in their recitals, in dozens of recordings, and in testimonials. Vaudeville and Broadway musicians regularly performed her songs—Elsie Baker and Eubie Blake made early recordings; with the advent of national radio networks in the late 1920s, popular musicians and swing band leaders increasingly arranged and recorded their versions. She was always among ASCAP’s top royalty earners. In 1938 her earnings of $10,000 put her in an elite group with Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin’s estate. Yet while there are currently 19 biographies of Berlin (seven since 2000) and 18 of Gershwin (nine since 2000), there are no scholarly biographies of Mrs. Bond.

Jacobs-Bond’s life story and cultural significance, like her songs, are today mostly unknown. In this presentation, Christopher Reynolds will examine what it is that made her such an extraordinarily significant figure, and then discuss three of her songs that became central parts of American rituals: “I Love you Truly,” at weddings, “I’ve Done My Work,” at funerals, particularly those of Black Americans, and “A Perfect Day,” a song that was routinely sung to end public gatherings of all kinds, a song favored above all others by WWI soldiers.