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“Pity Me, Loo!” The California Bird Song.
New York: Published by C. M. Cady 107 Duane St., 1879. Lith. by R. Teller 116 E. 11th St. Folio (13.25” x 10.25”) sheet music with chromolithographic front cover. 6 pp. including front cover, [2] pp. pub. ads., disbound from larger volume. CONDITION: Very good, light offsetting, very light foxing to lower margin of p. 6. A rare and marvelously illustrated piece of sheet music inspired by a summer of hiking in California, written by a prolific composer of Civil War sheet music and featuring a brilliantly-colored bird about to take wing over the Yosemite Valley. A jewel-like red and yellow bird, its blue and green wings outstretched, is the star of this view overlooking Yosemite Falls and the winding river valley, which is dotted with buildings and sheltered by high mountains in the distance. Three figures—evidently Indigenous—stand on an overlook at the lower right corner of the scene. “Pity, Me Loo!” is a late-career composition of Henry Clay Work (1832–1884), and his composer’s note explains that the title of the song imitates “the melody and vocal utterance of a bird that I often listened to during a summer spent in climbing the granite cliffs and rambling among the manzanita bushes, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada range.” The son of an Ohio abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor, Work rejected a career as a tailor and made his profession in printing. He is best known for his Union songs during and after the Civil War, most of which were published by the Chicago-based firm Root & Cady. Following the war, Work joined his brothers in an ill-fated farming scheme in New Jersey—and effectively lost his wife when she was committed to an insane asylum—while Root & Cady’s business was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Work removed to Philadelphia for several years, where he fell hopelessly in love with a much younger woman, and, to escape, spent a summer on the west coast in 1869. A chance meeting with Chauncy Marvin Cady, who had set up a short-lived publishing operation in New York, briefly reignited Work’s composing career. Despite the popularity of his “Marching Through Georgia” at Grand Army of the Republic reunions, Work died sad and poor at the age of fifty-two. Lithographer Robert Teller was a “prolific producer” of sheet music covers (Last). He was in three short-lived partnerships over the course of the late 1860s and early 1880s, and “After 1899 his own firm was known as Teller Sons & Dorner, with Robert Teller Jr., William Teller, and Charles A. Dorner.” The firm remained active until 1950. No examples recorded in OCLC. REFERENCES: Last, Jay. The Color Explosion : Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Santa Ana, CA: Hillcrest Press, 2005), p. 232; Tribble, Edwin. “Marching Through Georgia,” The Georgia Review Vol. 21, No. 4 (1967); Hill, Richard S. “The Mysterious Chord of Henry Clay Work,” Notes : Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association Vol. 10, No. 2 (1953).
Item #10570
On Hold
Price: $550.00
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