After the Ball (piece of music)

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Recording by George Gaskin, ca.1893
Title page of the sheet music edition from 1892

After the Ball is a piece of music by the American composer Charles K. Harris from 1892. Within a few years, the piece sold over 5 million copies as a sheet music edition. It is therefore considered to be the first million-dollar success in music history and is also often classified as the first Tin Pan Alley hit.

Text and music

Harris wrote the lyrics and music. The ballad is a lively waltz with three stanzas, between which the refrain can be heard once.

When asked why he was alone, an old man tells his niece the story of his great love broken on a ball night when he saw his mistress kissing another man. He persistently refused any attempt at explanation on her part. She died without the two of them seeing each other again. He later received a letter from the man his lover had kissed. It turned out that he was her brother, she died of a broken heart.

history

Emergence

During a trip to Chicago in 1892, Harris witnessed a falling out between two lovers in a dance hall. From this observation he developed the story behind After the Ball . In the original version, the story of lost love was told by a father of his daughter, but after a while Harris changed the narrative situation to his niece, as otherwise the initial situation could have been "improper".

After the Ball was not sung by any artist for over a year after it was composed. According to Harris, the decisive factor was the fact that it was unusually long and - unusual for the time - told a self-contained, dramatic story.

breakthrough

Harris reports that due to his persistent efforts, May Irwin premiered the play on Broadway and caused a sensation. According to other sources, the piece was first performed in Chicago by an amateur and failed because he forgot the lyrics. In the Bijou Theater in Chicago, it led then James Aldrich Libbey first professionally - but only after payment of $ 500 - he sang it during the intermission of a matinee . His performance was rewarded with five minutes of applause and led to the breakthrough of the piece. Harris received so many orders in a short space of time that he had to borrow money to print the first 75,000 copies of the piece.

Libbey now played the piece as part of the musical A Trip to Chinatown , it was his presentation that particularly contributed to the success of the piece. On the coast, Richard Jose popularized the play and Helen Mora sang it in vaudeville theaters across the United States . John Philip Sousa also appreciated the piece, he played it in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition , the world exhibition in Chicago, the performance, a first in show business, accompanied by slides.

Effects

After the Ball sold over 2 million times as a sheet of music within a few years of its issue, a total of over 5 million times. No piece of music had achieved such a success before. Immediately after the breakthrough, Harris generated income of up to $ 25,000 per week at times.

Harris published all of his pieces, including After the Ball , himself; the enormous success of After the Ball enabled him to found his own music publishing house in New York in 1894. He was also extremely successful as a lobbyist for the introduction of a copyright . The early protection date of After the Ball meant that it was also the first millionaire hit , the copyright of which expired in 1948.

The play was a huge hit with the gay nineties and became part of the collective memory of a generation. So it showed some afterlife in the decades that followed. B. as a historical element in the films San Francisco from 1936 and sung by Alice Faye in 1940 in Lillian Russell . After the Second World War, however, the piece was forgotten. Today it can hardly be heard, with the exception of performances of the musical Show Boat , of whose second act it is an integral part. Its historical significance is undisputed, as Ian Whitcomb named his work on the early history of American pop music after the piece After The Ball .

proof

  1. ^ A b c d R. Grant Smith: From Saginaw Valley to Tin Pan Alley: Saginaw's contribution to American popular music, 1890-1955 , 1998, ISBN 0814326587 , pp. 43-55
  2. ^ A b c Charles K. Harris: How To Write A Popular Song , New York, 1926, p. 2.
  3. ↑ Timothy E. Scheurer: American Popular Music , ISBN 0-87972-468-4 , 1990, p. 88
  4. ^ A b William Emmett Studwell: The Americana song reader , ISBN 0789001500 , 1997, pp. 7-8
  5. ↑ Dave Laing: A voice without a face: popular music and the phonograph in the 1890s In: Popular Music, 1991, Volume 10: 1, pp. 6-7
  6. ↑ Jack Burton: Honor Roll of Popular Songwriters , In: Billboard, Jan. 29, 1949, pp. 38-39
  7. ↑ Tin Pan Alley Project, Michael Garber: After the Ball .

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