The Only Way To Keep A Gal, Is To Keep Her In A Cage

Deanna was working on this piece on collecting vintage sheet music, and showed me this baby:


Since neither Deanna nor I have the sheet music, she's contacting the seller, Joel, of www.sheetmusiccenter.com, for a follow-up article on "coon" music. I'll post the follow-up when she's published it, but I couldn't wait to show off this old cover with a man with a key standing outside his caged girlfriend.

This is what I could find out.

It's by "The Originator of Ragtime" or "The Father of Ragtime" Ben Harney. The Rag-Time Ephemerist has an article on Harney, Ben Harney in Context, which doesn't illuminate the cover art or the song itself much, but the online article does quote from The New York Clipper (September 26, 1896) which covers Harney's time with the Boston Athenaeum Star Specialty Company (touring under the aegis of Andrew J. Hughes, proprietor of Boston's Howard Athenaeum Theater):

His coon songs gained enthusiastic response. He was assisted in the gallery and on the stage by 'Strap' Hill, a colored dancer and singer.

In the article (again, only part of which is available online) there's a tantalizing bit more on "the negro" in question:

Based on the recollections of Harney's wife Jessie, the authors of They All Played Ragtime identified his "stage assistant," "Strap" Hill as a "young Negro ragtime player and entertainer ... from Memphis" whom Harney first met either in or on his way to Chicago in 1893.3 Clipper citations make it clear that Harney and Hill worked together, on and off at least, from the fall of 1896 until the fall of 1898

Harney wasn't favored by commercial recording, but there's an MP3 of him singing The Wagon here.

Stay tuned, as they say...