PBA Galleries

• Hughie Cannon, “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?”  (c.1902) First or early printing, 4pp.
• Fogerty, Woodward and Jerome, “I Wonder Why Bill Bailey Don’t Come Home” (c.1902) 4pp.
• (Billy) Johnson and Furth, “Since Bill Bailey Came Back Home” (c.1902), 4pp.
• McCarron and Vincent, “When Old Bill Bailey Plays the Ukalele” (c.1915) 3pp.

All in the pre-War 11 x 14” format, the first three published by Howley, Haviland & Dresser, NY, the last, much later, by Broadway Music.

Cannon, the original composer of the classic ragtime “coon song” (as well as the sequel that became “Frankie and Johnny”) was white - though he used “Negro dialect” lyrics and both the original sheet music and the three spin-offs in this group all have front cover stereotypic drawings of Black men and women. Only one of the spin-offs had a Black co-composer (Billy Johnson) and only one performer pictured on a different printing of the original (Harry Browne) was Black. But the song was later immortalized by Black jazz musicians Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey.