100 x Singen

Joseph P. Skelly

The entertainment industry had its own class of exploited laborers: chorus girls, stagehands, bit players, and a certain type of songwriter. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the last years of Stephen Foster were a kind of sentimental paradigm for balladeers, who were expected to be impoverished, lonely, and alcoholicproducing nevertheless from the midst of misery gems of exquisite beauty. To a slight degree this melancholy scenario was based on fact: There were indeed a good number of hard-drinking, rough-living tunesmiths who provided publishers with raw melodies for a bill and a bottle. One of the best known was J. P. Skelly (1853-1895), whom Edward Marks describes in They All Sang as "the Bible house plumber who wrote 400 songs on brown wrapping paper."

Skelly was under the thumb of Frank Harding, publisher of "Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill," who used to boast that he could buy six songs from him for twenty-five dollars. In the course of a brief and well-stewed career, Skelly produced dozens of popular tunes, his greatest hit being "My Pretty Red Rose" (1877).

 

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