PBA Galleries

• Hughie Cannon, Words and Music. Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home ? (Howley Haviland & Dresser, NY, c.1902. 3pp. Pictorial cover with inset of blackface vaudeville singers. According to Fuld (1966), the First printing of the classic.
• Nat Vincent (Lyrics), Herman Paley (Music). Dancing the Jelly Roll (Remick, NY/Detroit, c.1915) 4pp.
• Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard and Kenneth Casey. Sweet Georgia Brown, A Charleston ’Swing’ Song (NY/Detroit, Remick, c. 1925)

Cannon, the original composer of the classic ragtime “coon song” Bill Bailey (as well as the sequel that became “Frankie and Johnny”) was white - though he used “Negro dialect” lyrics with sheet music stereotypic drawings of Black men and women. But the song was later immortalized by Black jazz musicians Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey. “Dancing the Jelly Roll” was a stark example of white appropriation of Black music, was published the same year as the “Jelly Roll Blues” of Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton, ragtime pianist, bandleader and composer, widely considered to be the first Jazz published in America. Significantly, Remick, the publisher, then employed in its New York office, a 17 year-old “song plugger” named George Gershwin. Ten years later, Remick also published “Sweet George Brown” (later the Harlem Globetrotters theme song) of which African-American Paceo Pinkard, was co-composer. Pinkard  produced some 200 songs between 1915 (when he was a year older than Gershwin) and 1940, being first resigned to writing music for songs with racist overtones, and, later, seeing his distinctive music appear with cover illustrations of white women and white singers.