sheet music at Indiana State
I have a new source of historical sheet music: odin.indstate.edu. It's not large or well organized, but it does have stuff that nobody else does, and it does have the real music stuff and not just the covers, so I have added it to my custom search engine for public domain sheet music.
custom search engine for public domain sheet music
Searching for public domain sheet music is a drag because the results are always dominated by commercial providers. So I created this custom search engine to limit the search results to sites in the "Sheet Music Sources" list in the right side of this page.
sheet music archive at Mississippi State
The sheet music collection at Mississippi State is a fine archive that I haven't come across before. Something notable about them is that they publish the music as PDFs rather than images embedded in web pages. Although it's a bit annoying to not be able to browse the pages, it's really nice to not have to grab and print each page one by one.
Here's the cover sheet for their scan of the 1899 cakewalk Smokey Mokes:
He’s in the Jailhouse Now
Blind Blake -- He's in the Jailhouse Now (MP3)
I put together a lead sheet of the 1920s classic "He's in the Jailhouse Now" because I needed it to rehearse a biggish band, and there's no reason to keep it to myself.
According to Roosevelt's Blues, the song has been traced back to at least 1917, but the use of the abusive term "coon" in the lyrics may point to an earlier origin, perhaps around the turn of the century.
The song's origins were probably in the medicine show circuit, according to Songsters and Saints. Ernest Rogers claimed to have sung it over the radio as early as 1922.
In 1924 it was recorded by the jug band leader Buford Threlkeld - "Whistler" - as "Jail House Blues".
The veteran medicine show entertainer Jim Jackson
recorded it in 1927. Earl McDonald's Original Louisville Jug Band recorded recorded an almost identical version in 1927. Again in 1927, Blind Blake recorded a version with a medicine show banjo player named Gus Cannon. There was another version, in 1930, by the Memphis Sheiks, aka The Memphis Jug Band. And the best known and most enduring early version was made in 1927 by the proto-country singer Jimmie Rodgers, who had a background in the medicine show circuit.
All Music Guide, by the way, usually credits the song to Jimmie Rodgers, which goes to show something or other.
As old as this song is, the copyright status is less clean than with most of the music on this site. This is based most closely on the Memphis Jug Band's version, which was recorded in 1930 and is not yet in the public domain in the US. Most of the words in that version probably come from sources now in the public domain, but there are also probably additions that are still under copyright, I just don't know what they are. So caveat emptor if you record this. My own copyrightable contributions, including these files, are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, which means you're free to share and modify them as long as you give credit and extend the same courtesy.
For a printout grab this PDF version of the lead sheet. If you want to edit my version, grab the Sibelius source file. If you just need to change the key and don't have Sibelius, you can use the Scorch-O-Matic to do it in the browser. And here's the PNG:
Slightly on the Mash
This is a recording of an 1885 song called "Slightly on the Mash". It's a happy number for drinking, dancing and goofing off.
MP3:
Slightly on the Mash Schottische
(1:53)
The Guadalupe Watershed was an area of intense activity during the California Gold Rush, with the quicksilver mines within Santa Clara County supporting the gold refinement process.Maybe Pianissimo was a musician who had gone west to strike it rich.
Dancing
This song is a dance called a schottische. Per Wikipedia, Schottische was popular in Victorian era ballrooms (part of the Bohemian "folk-dance" craze) and left its traces in folk music of countries as distant as France, Spain (chotis), Portugal (choutiça), Italy and Sweden.
Musically this is an intricate little tune which feels like an evolutionary step on the way to ragtime and eventually jazz. Wikipedia says At the start of the 20th century in the Southern United States the schottische was combined with ragtime; the most popular "ragtime schottische" of the era was "Any Rags" by Thomas S. Allen in 1902.
If you want to dance along at home, it goes like this: step step step hop, step step step hop, step hop step hop step hop step hop. Posh dancers did it like this:
Knuckledraggers were probably more like this:
Playing along
Free culture
There is code to embed a player for the song in another web page:
UCB sheet music
I just found a new source of historical American sheet music -- the web site of the University of Colorado at Boulder has a sheet music music collection. It's not huge overall, but it has a great ragtime section.