appealed to others, since they attained so wide a circulation. They bespoke, as I always felt, a wistful, seeking, uncertain temperament, tender and illusioned, with no practical knowledge of any side of life, but full of a true poetic feeling for the mystery and pathos of life and death, the wonder of the waters, the stars, the flowers, accidents of life, success, failure. Beginning with a song called “Wide Wings” (published by a small retail music- house in Evansville, Indiana), and followed by such national successes as “The Letter That Never Came,” “I Believe It, For My Mother Told Me So” (!), “The Convict and the Bird,” “The Pardon Came Too Late,” “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” “The Blue and the Grey,” “On the Bowery,” “On the Banks of the Wabash,” and a number of others, he was never content to rest and never really happy, I think, save when composing. During this time, however, he was at different periods all the things I have described—a black-face monologue artist, an end- and at times a middle-man, a publisher, and so on.
I recall being with him at the time he composed two of his most famous successes: “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” and “On the Banks of the Wabash,” and noting his peculiar mood, almost amounting to a deep depression which ended a little later in marked elation or satisfaction, once he had succeeded in evoking something which really pleased him.
The first of these songs must have followed an actual encounter with some woman or girl whose life had seemingly if not actually gone to wreck on the shore of love or passion. At any rate he came into the office of his publishing house one gray November Sunday afternoon—it was our custom to go there occasionally, a dozen or more congenial souls, about as one might go to a club—and going into a small room which was fitted up with a piano as a “try-out” room (professionals desiring a song were frequently taught it in the office), he began improvising, or rather repeating over and over, a certain strain which was evidently in his mind. A little while later he came out and said, “Listen to this, will you, Thee?”
He played and sang the first verse and chorus. In the middle of the latter, so moved was he by the sentiment of it, his voice broke and he had to stop. Tears stood in his eyes and he wiped them away. A moment or two later he was able to go through it without wavering and I thought it charming for the type of thing it was intended to be. Later on (the following spring) I was literally astonished to see how, after those various efforts usually made by popular music publishers to make a song “go”—advertising it in the
It was the same with “On the Banks of the Wabash,” possibly an even greater success, for it came eventually to be adopted by his native State as its State song, and in that region streets and a town were named after him. In an almost unintentional and unthinking way I had a hand in that, and it has always cheered me to think that I had, although I have never had the least talent for musical composition or song versification. It was one of those delightful summer Sunday mornings (1896, I believe), when I was still connected with his firm as editor of the little monthly they were issuing, and he and myself, living with my sister E----, that we had gone over to this office to do a little work. I had a number of current magazines I wished to examine; he was always wishing to compose something, to express that ebullient and emotional soul of his in some way.
“What do you suppose would make a good song these days?” he asked in an idle, meditative mood, sitting at the piano and thrumming while I at a nearby table was looking over my papers. “Why don’t you give me an idea for one once in a while, sport? You ought to be able to suggest something.”
“Me?” I queried, almost contemptuously, I suppose. I could be very lofty at times in regard to his work, much as I admired him—vain and yet more or less dependent snip that I was. “I can’t write those things. Why don’t you write something about a State or a river? Look at ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ‘Dixie,’ ‘Old Black Joe’—why don’t you do something like that, something that suggests a part of America? People like that. Take Indiana—what’s the matter with it—the Wabash River? It’s as good as any other river, and you were ‘raised’ beside it.”
I have to smile even now as I recall the apparent zest or feeling with which all at once he seized on this. It seemed to appeal to him immensely. “That’s not a bad idea,” he agreed, “but how would you go about it? Why don’t you write the words and let me put the music to them? We’ll do it together!”
“But I can’t,” I replied. “I don’t know how to do those things. You write it. I’ll help—maybe.”
After a little urging—I think the fineness of the morning had as much to do with it as anything—I took a piece of paper and after meditating a while scribbled in the most tentative manner imaginable the first verse and chorus of that song almost as it was published. I think one or two lines were too long or didn’t rhyme, but eventually either he or I hammered them into shape, but before that I rather shamefacedly turned them over to him, for somehow I was convinced that this work was not for me and that I was rather loftily and cynically attempting what my good brother would do in all faith and feeling.
He read it, insisted that it was fine and that I should do a second verse, something with a story in it, a girl perhaps—a task which I solemnly rejected.
“No, you put it in. It’s yours. I’m through.”
Some time later, disagreeing with the firm as to the conduct of the magazine, I left—really was forced out— which raised a little feeling on my part; not on his, I am sure, for I was very difficult to deal with.
Time passed and I heard nothing. I had been able to succeed in a somewhat different realm, that of the magazine contributor, and although I thought a great deal of my brother I paid very little attention to him or his affairs, being much more concerned with my own. One spring night, however, the following year, as I was lying in my bed trying to sleep, I heard a quartette of boys in the distance approaching along the street in which I had my room. I could not make out the words at first but the melody at once attracted my attention. It was plaintive and compelling. I listened, attracted, satisfied that it was some new popular success that had “caught on.” As they drew near my window I heard the words “On the Banks of the Wabash” most mellifluously harmonized.
I jumped up. They were my words! It was Paul’s song! He had another “hit” then—“On the Banks of the Wabash,” and they were singing it in the streets already! I leaned out of the window and listened as they approached and passed on, their arms about each other’s shoulders, the whole song being sung in the still street, as it were, for my benefit. The night was so warm, delicious. A full moon was overhead. I was young, lonely, wistful. It brought back so much of my already spent youth that I was ready to cry—for joy principally. In three
