1862–1946 · United States · 20th century
Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1862–1946) was a singer, pianist and songwriter from the United States who wrote about 175 popular pieces. She is perhaps best remembered for "I Love You Truly", the song with which she became the first woman to sell a million copies of a song. The site offers her songs for voice and piano at the upper-intermediate and advanced levels.
Carrie Minetta Jacobs was born on 11 August 1862 in Janesville, Wisconsin, in the house of her mother's parents. She was the only child of Dr Hannibal Jacobs and Mary Emogene Davis Jacobs. She lost her father in childhood, and the family then struggled for money.
Most of the family loved music, and her father played the flute. At four Carrie was already finding tunes on the piano by ear, at six she could reproduce certain pieces right after hearing them, and at eight she could play Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody just from hearing it. From nine to seventeen she studied piano and dreamed of becoming a songwriter. She went to an ordinary public school in Janesville.
As a child she took piano lessons from local teachers. The performer Blind Tom Wiggins travelled around the country; he memorised at once any tune played to him and repeated it. After his performance young Carrie was urged to sit at the piano, and she amazed the audience by repeating Tom's tune.
Carrie's first marriage was short. She married Edward Smith J. Smith, who came from Janesville; their son Frederick Jacobs Smith, her only child, arrived on 23 July 1882. They divorced in 1887.
Her second husband, whom she married in 1888, was a friend from childhood, Dr Frank Lewis Bond, a Wisconsin man from Johnstown. The couple settled at Iron River, Michigan. Carrie ran the household and brought in extra money from ceramic painting, piano teaching and her own compositions. For some years she lived among miners and loggers; when the iron-mining area fell into economic collapse, Frank had no money left. It was her husband who encouraged her to start writing music, in the late 1880s.
In 1895 a child's snowball hit Dr Bond; he slipped on the ice and five days later died of crushed ribs. The debts were larger than the 4,000 dollars of his life insurance, and Carrie returned to Janesville. Selling ceramics, letting rooms and writing songs did not cover her bills. She sold her furniture bit by bit and ate once a day.
Once she had some success with composing, Carrie moved to Chicago with her son to live closer to music publishers. For several years nearly all her songs remained unpublished manuscripts, and she had to earn money by performing them at social evenings and concerts. Gradually it became clear that listeners liked her simple, tuneful music. Carrie's words and music were sentimental, and sentimentality was very popular at the time.
Time and again the music business, which men ran, refused to publish her work, so in 1896 Carrie set up a sheet music firm of her own. Few women worked in the trade then; she may have been the only one who held all rights to the words of all her songs.
Carrie wrote "I Love You Truly" in Janesville, where she lived at 402 East Milwaukee Street after coming back from Iron River following her second husband's death. How it came to be published began with a chance meeting. A young singer from the neighbouring flat had to leave suddenly and asked Carrie to keep her manager and another man company. The manager, Victor P. Sincere, noticed the manuscripts and asked whether they were hers, then asked her to play something. Carrie played "I Love You Truly".
When Sincere asked whether she would like the song performed in public, Carrie said no: the song had not been copyrighted, and someone might steal it. She then had second thoughts, went to the telephone in the corner drugstore and rang the opera star Jessie Bartlett Davis, although they had never met. Carrie hoped that Davis would give her song the success that "Oh Promise Me" (Reginald De Koven and Clement Scott) had enjoyed in Davis's hands in 1898. Davis offered to pay for the publication of the collection "Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose".
The collection came out in 1901 and included two of Carrie's most lasting songs, "I Love You Truly" and "Just Awearyin' for You". The book's success let her enlarge the Bond Shop, her publishing house, which she and her son had originally started in her Janesville flat. Still in 1901, David Bispham sang a recital of nothing but Jacobs-Bond songs at Chicago's Studebaker Theatre, adding to her celebrity.
A few years later, her friends helped her to perform for Theodore Roosevelt. In England she appeared in a recital alongside Enrico Caruso, and she gave several recitals in New York. The American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar was her collaborator too; five songs with his words and her music came out in 1906.
"A Perfect Day" came out in 1910, and 25 million copies of its sheet music were sold. It was her most popular work during her lifetime, though "I Love You Truly" got more performances in later years. In the First World War she gave concerts for US Army troops in Europe, and "A Perfect Day" was a special favourite with the soldiers.
President Harding invited her, and on 2 February 1922 she performed at his White House state dinner for the justices of the Supreme Court. No woman composer of her time was more successful; by some reports her royalties passed one million dollars by the close of 1910. The General Federation of Women's Clubs cited her in 1941 for what she had done for the progress of women in the twentieth century.
In the early 1920s Carrie and her son moved to Hollywood, hoping it would soothe her rheumatism. Her firm had moved eight times by then and came to rest in Hollywood, where she kept on performing and publishing. Her home there was called "The End of the Road", the name of her 1940 book as well. She backed the Theatre Arts Alliance at an early stage; it was behind the Hollywood Bowl, close to her house.
"Because of the Light", among her final pieces, appeared in print in December 1944; she was 82. In December 1946 she died of a cerebral haemorrhage in her Hollywood home. Her grave is in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, in the section called the Court of Honor.
Carrie Jacobs-Bond composed around 175 popular pieces between the 1890s and the early 1940s. "I Love You Truly" is a parlor song, perhaps the one she is best remembered for; it first came out in the 1901 collection, together with "Just Awearyin' for You", another song that many singers recorded. Right after release, "A Perfect Day" (1910) sold more than any other. In 2009 an NPR documentary about her put the spotlight on three big hits: "I Love You Truly", "Just Awearyin' for You" and "A Perfect Day".
Apart from songs she brought out poetry for children and her life story, "The Roads of Melody" (1927). She drew the covers of her sheet music herself, and the wild rose, her trademark, appears on many of the editions. Her music was simple and tuneful, her words and music sentimental, and sentimentality was very popular at the time.
Of her roughly 175 works, the site collects five songs for voice and piano: "Nothing But a Wild Rose", "The Angelus", "Because I Am Your Friend" and "Walking in Her Garden" at the upper-intermediate level, and "Do You Remember" at the advanced level. "Nothing But a Wild Rose" is a good place to start.