A New Piece of music!

Look what came in the mail! 

How I was anxious to get it open when the package came... I expected Len Spencer to be on the cover, but he wasn't, though this sheet is still an early edition to Hylands' catalog, as it doesn't include the longer footer with extra locations, seen below:

That footer is the extremely late-1899 t0 1900 footer that they used. Since that's not on the music I got, my guess is that this one was sold in September-November 1899, somewhat early on in the firm's existence, though not as early as the piece I have with Ada Jones on the cover. The covers on Hylands' music were usually very intricate, to attract more buyers, but this one seems somewhat like it's not particularly as much as other ones I have seen. It does, oddly, seem a little more modest than some of the other lavish covers that Hylands approved. Hylands did advertise after all that his music covers were used by exhibitioners everywhere, and he probably brought bags full of his music to the few exhibitions he went to after 1898. He must have given away hundreds of copies, and sold plenty more to exhibitioners. 

I always consider the song of Hylands' I just got as Fred's "baby" in many aspects. Why? well, he promoted the song so much in 1899 and 1900, and he loved it personally, and he continued to sell the song until the end of the firm with Spencer and Harry W. Yeager. He also refused to let the big firms he sold his stock to take "You Don't Stop the World from Going Round". he wanted to keep it for himself, as he loved the song so much, also that he enjoyed the success from it so fully. It's strange to think that he had such feelings and sentiment for that song of his, and really nothing else he wrote after that, save for his scores for The Beauty Doctor, that was really the only other music of his that he loved till death. 

Now to change the subject a little bit, this evening, I was listening to Billy Golden's 1897 Columbia of "Uncle Jefferson" and playing along with that infamously hard to identify piano accompaniment. It is still the most perplexing of brown waxes for many of my friends who have heard it, even to the collector who owns it. I have gone from thinking it's Fred Hylands, to Gaisberg, to Banta, and to Issler, but now I think I am starting to settle on Hylands. Why? Well, I listened very closely to the clearly indicated syncopation, and some of the very quick kind of trilled notes, that sound more like Hylands than Issler or Gaisberg. But the only thing that throws me off is the date indication of the announcement. It's a Columbia with "...of New York City" announcement which indicates 1896-97 as the year range, though the circumstances of this one are seeming more like 1897. But why would Hylands be there so early on? This was recorded obviously in earlier 1897, more specifically March-June 1897. That is a little early for Hylands, then again, I don't exactly know when they had him begin his several months on trial there, but it was certainly in 1897 that this happened. It's near impossible that Hylands was recorded that early on, but anything is possible when looking into the earliest years of the recording business. Hylands did not live too far away from Columbia in 1897, too far a walk for Hylands, but any regular person could walk it. So it wouldn't really be too surprising if Hylands began his trial at Columbia in mid-1897. 

Hope you enjoyed this! Not much I got to say this evening...