Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,010

This is the grave of Carrie Jacobs-Bond.

Born in 1862 in Janesville, Wisconsin, Carrie Jacobs grew up pretty well off, the daughter of a doctor. But then her father died and the family was somewhat downwardly mobile. But the family was super musical. She could pick up tunes by ear and play them and developed the dream of being a songwriter. The world of songwriting was very different back in the world before recorded music. You published a song with sheet music and hoped it became a hit that way. Seems hard, but there was a big demand for this stuff, due of course to the lack of other entertainment options, so you could have a good career. You might not be Stephen Foster, but then you might be.

Well, Jacobs married at 18 and it did not stick and she got a divorce after several years, not that common in the 1880s. She soon married again, to her childhood boyfriend, a doctor named Frank Lewis Bond. She made the interesting and, at that time, unusual choice to hyphenate her last name. So Carrie Jacobs-Bond it became. He worked in the timber camps of northern Michigan and so she became a homemaker in these isolated communities. They didn’t have much money. Then, he became the only person I’ve ever heard who was killed by a snowball. Specifically, someone threw a snowball at him, he fell, and whacked his head on ice. I definitely have heard of people getting traumatic brain injuries from winter up in those parts (I have multiple friends who deal with this unfortunate occurrence and will to some extent be dealing with it for the rest of their lives). Winter in the upper Midwest, no thank you.

So, Jacobs-Bond had to make it on her own and raise a kid too. She went back to Janesville, sold ceramics, and started back in on her songwriter dream. Very slowly, she started selling songs. She then moved to Chicago to make a real go of this. She had trouble getting most of them published though. Some of this is that she was a woman. But people liked her work. She often made money in these years by singing the songs herself as social gatherings and events and the response was positive. So she just started her own publishing company. This worked. She had gotten to know the opera singer Jessie Bartlett Davis, who helped her. Jacobs-Bond, who was evidently fearless, had cold-called Davis in hopes of selling her a song. They got along and Davis agreed to fund the publication of her first songbook, Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose, which is a very weird title for a group of songs. I guess “The Wild Rose” was unpretentious, whatever that means in this context!

Well, Davis was a big fan of what she heard. So they got the book out and two of the songs became big hits–“I Love You Truly” and “Just Awearyin’ for You.” People quickly wanted more. The baritone David Bispham became a big fan and decided to do a whole concert of her songs in Chicago, which sold out and really upper her budding stardom. She soon became a big deal of her own, including for her voice. Within a few years, she was singing for Theodore Roosevelt and Enrico Caruso. She also was happy to work with Black artists and she wrote songs with Paul Laurence Dunbar, with him writing the lyrics and she writing the music. Her biggest hit was “A Perfect Day,” published in 1910 and which sold 25 million copies of sheet music, which I assume is over the years and probably also included international sales. But still, that’s a lot of sales! She earned about $1 million in royalties that year alone. This made her among the richest single women in America, especially once you take out inherited money.

By World War I, Jacobs-Bond was popular enough to travel to Europe and perform for American troops, in an early USO type performance. Jacobs-Bond eventually moved to California in the 1920s. This put her both in the center of the burgeoning American entertainment industry (more than Chicago anyway) and also was good for her health as she had arthritis problems. But she would come back east for events, such as singing for President Harding in 1922 at a state dinner he had to honor the Supreme Court. I’m trying to imagine a state dinner to honor those nine hacks on the Court today. Hope not!

I don’t know what the family relationship was like, but her son killed himself in 1932 while listening to his mother sing “A Perfect Day” on record. Uh…good times…… She also published some poetry in the 1920s. No idea if it is any good or not, but her 1921 poetry book Tales of Little Dogs does not have a title that suggests a good set of poems.

Jacobs-Bond worked until the very end, or almost. Her last song was published in 1944. By then, she was widely acknowledged as one of the most important women in American musical history. Lots of major early artists recorded her songs, including Bing Crosby and Benny Goodman. Later, Pat Boone recorded some of her work, which I won’t blame her for.

Jacobs-Bond died in Hollywood in 1946, one of the most beloved women in American popular culture. She’s totally forgotten about today though. In fact, I had never heard of her until I saw her grave in this place on honor. And why? Now look, it’s not like most of us are listening to a lot of songs from the early 20th century. But we know Irving Berlin. We know George and Ira Gershwin. They were contemporaries of Jacobs-Bond. Do we forget her because she’s a woman? That’s probably too simplistic–lots of male composers from the era are also forgotten today. But still, you have to wonder what’s up here.

Carrie Jacobs-Bond is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California. This is the Great Mausoleum in the main building, one of the only parts of that building that you can access (which sucks because there’s a lot of people stuffed into boxes in that place). Only a few really special people from the mid 40s got this kind of honor. Jacobs-Bond was one of those, complete with a Herbert Hoover epitaph. Also, you can visit her house back in Michigan, which looks very much to me like the kind of historical site that a museum complex picked up and then today is stuck with even though no one knows who this person is and there’s no particular reason to visit it.

Jacobs-Bond was an inaugural inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, back in 1970. If you would like this series to visit other members of that HOF, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Otto Harbach is in Salt Lake City and Hank Williams is in Montgomery, Alabama. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.