| When history was being made, great deeds and small foibles both came to the fore as subject matter for song writers. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, when piano remained the instrument for general family and stage use, there were plenty of happenings for people to sing about. The early 1900s are rich in songs about characters who made current news in the papers – sportsmen, entertainers, financiers, and murderers. Period songs are also about innovations in the lives of the people – the telephone, the Atlantic City Boardwalk, the automobile. These songs help preserve our country’s heritage. |
 |  |  | During the 1914 movie serialization of the suspenseful Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White, a new song was composed called Poor Pauline. The music by Raymond Walker, was bouncy, the lyrics, by Charles McCarron, simple but engaging.
| An integral part of urban life for more than 30 years, the trolley car was a link in urban transportation and one of the great conveniences of its time. Trolley cars had their defects too as they were crowded and the ride was often awkward, as described inThe Trolley Car Swing. A big hit in 1912, it was the work of a leading words-and-music team, Joe Young and Bert Grant. | In 1909, the Mitchell, a popular but short-lived car model, introduced its own advertising song Give Me a Spin in Your Mitchell Bill. The words, by C. P. McDonald, and the melody, by J. W. Gilson, were catchy enough to appeal to a legitimate publisher, the Music House of Laemmle.
|  |  |  | | John D. Rockefeller, the country’s richest man, was in the news in 1907. His Standard Oil Company of Indiana was fined $29,240,000 for violations of an act forbidding secret railroad rates. The decision was a momentous one, and the publicity extended to the popular song Standard Oil, by F. L. Hill and A. F. Scheu. | Tin-pan Alley found that the Salvation Army had its own peculiar type of attractiveness, not for followers or converts, but for those people who enjoyed popular songs. For them the Salvation Army girl had sex appeal, and the best known was Salvation Nell, immortalized in song by lyricists Grant Clark and Edgar Leslie and veteran composer Theodore Morse. | The Americans ran away with the 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm. Lyricist Leon Sekoson tried to incorporate the name of every top American participant in the field in the verses to Hats Off! To Our Olympian Athletes. As for the music, composer Paul Eugene incorporated snatches of half a dozen well-known patriotic tunes in the melody of the chorus. | | The Tour Continues on the Next Page | | |
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