Chicago's Music Industry: A Quest for World Class, #2

By Edward Sharp

The story of Chicago's rise and fall as a national music center. A history of Chicago's contributions to the American songbook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: World Class Chicago Publishing LLC
• Release date: Dec 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991193271

Book preview

Introduction to Music Business

The Illinois Central brought the Blues to Chicago

Leonard Chess, President Chess Records

In February of 1980, Coen Solleveld the chief executive officer of a Netherlands based music conglomerate announced the reorganization and realignment of his company’s assets in a press release written in an argot only CEO’s and MBA’s could possibly understand: consolidate Polygram’s current U.S. market-share, enhance future growth prospects and profitability, maximize its management talent and integrate its pending acquisition of certain of Decca LTD’s music activities... The translation of the corporate palaver about consolidating current market-share was that the company which purchased the company that purchased Chicago-based Mercury Records was closing Mercury Records’ Chicago headquarters and moving the retained staff to New York. At its height, Mercury Records had been the fifth largest record company in the United States and with its departure, Chicago a city that once possessed a large community of music companies was now bereft of any major music companies. Yet there was very little notice much less protest or outrage in Chicago. No citizens with pitchforks and torches assembled in the public square seeking vengeance on the Dutch monster that had done Chicago wrong. Chicago’s daily newspapers ignored the news leaving the analysis to the music trade journals. It was as if no one in Chicago even knew that a major music company actually existed in their city much less that it had any import to Chicago’s cultural well-being.

Of all the sundry American arts, music is the one in which Chicago has had the greatest success over the longest period of time and with the greatest influence on the American culture. Until rap music started in a Brooklyn, New York housing project in the late 1970’s and then spread across the nation, every other single genre of music considered solely American in origin - Minstrel music, Ragtime, Jazz, Blues, Country, Folk, Gospel - was born and nurtured between the two mountain ranges, popularized in Chicago and then spread across the nation to the two coasts. The American songbook was written in the American heartland not on the coasts. The civic chauvinists in countless American cities claim their hometown as the birthplace of various American music genres, a claim perpetually disputable because a music genre has many influences occurring near simultaneously and emanating from manifold locations but in all these American music genres, it was Chicago-based companies who were most responsible for first popularizing the music and making it known to the greater world.

Chicago became a national music production center decades before the City’s writers began to influence American letters or before Chicago’s architects started to design structures in the first uniquely American architectural style instead of the traditional European vernacular. There are songs originated and published in Chicago from the mid-19th century that are on occasion still played by modern era musical artists. There was a small community of songsmiths, composers and music publishers in Chicago when many of the City’s residents still remembered Fort Dearborn and life in a frontier outpost. The music composed and published in Chicago during the Civil War was cited by politicians and historians as instrumental in abetting the morale of the citizenry in the North through America’s worst war. By the first decades of the 20th century, Chicago had a large community of music publishers and music promoters second only to New York in total size and second to none in genre diversity. Yet the rest of the century would see a slow diminishing in both the scale and the diversity of the local music industry to where even smaller American cities had greater influence and larger music industries than Chicago. During the century, some of the largest music companies in the nation would be started by Chicagoans and yet these same Chicagoans would be as responsible for the diminution of Chicago’s own music industry as any rivals in distant cities. Chicago’s decline as a national music production center was in great part self-inflicted.

A History of Chicago’s Music Industry

1830’s-1850’s First music venue-first local composer with a hit song-Root & Cady

The first musical impresario to reside in Chicago was Mark Beaubien, a man of French descent via Canadian birth. His older brother Jean Baptiste worked in the fur trade and was by some historical accounts the second permanent resident of what became Chicago. Upon Jean Baptiste Beaubien’s arrival in 1817, there was a scant market for music or cultural divertissements as five years earlier the Pottawattamie Indians had burned Fort Dearborn and slaughtered most of the small population; nevertheless, land was now cheap. Mark Beaubien followed his brother to the settlement surrounding Fort Dearborn in 1826, built a cabin which housed his family and served as a public inn named the Eagle Exchange. By the 1830’s Chicago may still have been a frontier mud-hole but it was a booming frontier mud-hole especially as the belief grew that Chicago was destined to soon become a continental center of commerce following the construction of a proposed canal that would connect the Mississippi River system with the Great Lakes and the East via the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. In 1833, Beaubien decided to expand his Eagle Exchange Inn to accommodate the growing flow of travelers through Chicago. He opened the Sauganash Tavern on Lake Street near the Chicago River while also operating the Government owned ferry. On Saturday nights Beaubien opened the dining room to dancing with music provided by himself playing a fiddle. Eventually Beaubien’s brother imported a piano from Europe to accompany Mark’s fiddle music. With sixteen children it is a wonder that Mark Beaubien had the time or energy to perform but his Saturday music presentations at the Sauganash became Chicago’s first musical tradition.

As a musical impresario, Beaubien seemed to be quite magnanimous as there is no record that he charged anyone for his musical revelry. Travelers or fellow citizens were free to consume the music, join in the dance or bring their own musical instruments and add to the music. His ethics as an innkeeper left a little more to be desired. The Sauganash’s lodging was an open loft for men. Those who retired early and fell asleep would discover Beaubien had taken the blanket and reissued it to another client. By this parsimonious use of bedding inventory, his daughter would later tell a historian, he often used only two blankets but received revenue for many more.

Until a public building meant for music presentation was constructed, the first churches of frontier Chicago served as the City’s musical venues. Churches would become a fount of vocal talent for the City throughout the remainder of the 19th century. The first church with a choral group and an organ was the St. James Episcopal Church founded within months of Chicago’s own incorporation. The St. James Cathedral in the 21st century is located on Huron Street in the western shadows of North Michigan Avenue’s much larger cathedrals to commerce. Yet the congregation continues to offer musical presentations in its cathedral as it did at its beginning in 1834. Arguably this is Chicago’s oldest continuing cultural tradition.

During Chicago’s first decade and a half, public musical performances were limited by the lack of appropriate public venues. The few early churches and small hotels, such as the Tremont House and the Sauganash, served as the City’s first music halls although they were severely limited in capacity. In 1847, John Rice opened the first stage theater in Chicago and three years later a new, larger Tremont Hotel opened with a large room for public entertainment. While Rice’s Theater was meant primarily for dramas, John Rice made the theater available for music impresarios, be they traveling musical troupes or aspiring local companies. The first opera performance before a Chicago audience is believed to have taken place in Rice’s Theater on July 29th, 1850. The opera company had come in to Chicago from Milwaukee but where it was headquartered isn’t clear nor did it bring its own orchestra. The start of Chicago’s first opera season was a big event for Chicago’s society elite yet it was not a fortuitous augury as the theater caught fire after the second performance leaving Chicago without a theater for three years until John Rice had rebuilt his house. Fire would continue to plague Chicago and Chicago theater.

The canal linking the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River expected to be operational in the 1830’s was finally completed in 1848. The Illinois and Michigan Canal gave Chicago an immediate economic advantage over its inland competitors Cincinnati, Ohio and St. Louis, Missouri. It also brought to Chicago a wave of immigrants. It was the Irish whose labors built the canal but it was the Germans who came in greater numbers. By 1850 one of every sixth Chicagoan was of German birth. The original settlers of Chicago had been overwhelmingly of English descent and protestant. While all the ethnic groups shared the same aspiration for a better life, their cultural and religious differences often manifested into political disputes occasionally turning violent. Yet the different ethnic populations provided Chicago with a new diversity and richness in music as they all brought their old world musical traditions to the new world.

Through the remainder of the 19th century Chicago’s German population played a dominant role in opera and orchestra music. The first attempt to establish a resident orchestra in Chicago was led by a German immigrant, Julius Dydrenfurth, born in Prussia. Dydrenfurth started as a farmer north of Chicago but found life tilling the soil not to his liking. He found employment in a bank and was credited with devising and implementing an accounting system that continued in use in Chicago for several decades thereafter. In 1850, Dydrenfurth organized an orchestra of twenty-two musicians, many of whom he had lured from the East, and began presenting concerts in the Tremont House Hotel. Dydrenfurth’s philharmonic orchestra would last several seasons but was not commercially strong enough to withstand an economic contraction during the mid-1850’s.

At the very depth of the recession in 1857 James McVicker opened his new theater in Chicago which replaced the retired John Rice’s theater as a first-class venue for music and theater. McVicker had once been a member of John Rice’s stock company and claimed that he had been in the chorus of the ill-fated La Sonnambula, performed in Rice’s Theater on July 29th, 1850. McVicker operated with his own theater stock company but routinely presented traveling opera companies in his theater when they were available. Until the end of the century, if Chicagoans were going to enjoy orchestral music or Grand Opera, then the music was usually provided by traveling companies. In 1853, Chicago was blessed to witness a join concert by Ole Bull, an esteemed Norwegian violinist, and a ten year old Adelina Patti six years before her debut in opera. There were no resident musical companies tantamount to those in the East or in the Old World. The music that developed in Chicago first wasn’t opera or orchestra which is more the pleasure of the wealthier classes but popular music enjoyed in the beer gardens or sung in the church choirs, the schools or the home family parlor.

In 1850 Chicago was a small town of almost 30,000 residents but it was growing fast and would triple in population over the course of the decade even with a major economic contraction at mid-decade. In this era, music was often handed down from generation to generation orally. The only means to record music was on paper as sheet music or in songbooks. With a growing population of consumers, a small industry of music publishers and retailers began to germinate in Chicago. The first dry-goods merchants in Chicago advertised the sale of musical instruments and sheet music although music was not their area of expertise. The first merchant to actually specialize in the music market was Brainard and Mould who opened a store on Lake Street not far from Mark Beaubien’s Sauganash Tavern in 1847. Evidently the store struggled in its early years as Brooks Mould went through a series of short-lived partnerships or operated the store as a sole proprietorship. In 1854, Mould partnered with a Robert Greene, the first businessman to manufacture musical instruments in Chicago, but this enterprise existed but a brief time also and by 1857 both Greene and Mould were operating stores on Lake Street. Robert Greene’s business endeavors were quite ambitious. He operated a retail store, a small factory that manufactured melodeons, a type of mechanical organ, and he launched a magazine, the Western Journal of Music that was the first Chicago magazine in the music genre.

The stores of Robert Greene and Brooks Mould were not the sole retail operations on Lake Street in the 1850’s to offer printed music. Samuel C. Griggs opened his first bookstore in Chicago on Lake Street in 1848. Griggs would eventually become the dominant book retailer in Chicago, the largest West of Philadelphia, and music books were a major facet of his operation. In fact, he was in part financed by an established Eastern music publisher, Mark H. Newman, who desired an outlet for his songbooks in the West. Griggs quickly gained the market for volume sales of textbooks including songbooks to schools and hymnbooks to churches. While the preponderance of sheet music and songbooks sold in these three retail establishments were the products of popular musicians from the East, all three businesses did publish some original works by aspiring local composers. Mould published Wau-Bun Galop that was dedicated to Juliette Kinzie who had in 1856 written a novel, Wau-Bun based on frontier Chicago and Mould and Greene published Rescue Grand March that was dedicated to the rescuers of a merchant ship that sank in a gale off Chicago in 1854. Still none of the Chicago-originated music published by Greene, Grigg or Mould was well remembered or of much national import. That would change with the arrival of the fourth music publication business in Chicago: Hiram M. Higgins.

H. M. Higgins was born into a family of musicians who traveled the country, the northern section of the country, during the political campaign of 1840 singing campaign songs for their candidate William Henry Harrison. Higgins would recall to a Chicago Tribune reporter half a century later that he had started his musical career going from town to town singing and passing out hard cider to motivate the electorate to support Old Tippecanoe. He seemed to possess the moral compass for a career as a Chicago politician. He arrived in Chicago shortly after the election with his family. His father saw Chicago as nothing but a swamp and preferred Milwaukee as the family’s final destination but Hiram saw potential in the fast growing and centrally located village and decided to settle in Chicago. He initially made his living as an itinerant music teacher working in the small Midwestern towns surrounding Chicago and leading the choir in the Baptist Church on Sundays.

By 1855, Hiram started a music store in the growing city first on Randolph Street and then on Lake Street. With competition from Mould, Greene and several other musical retail operations, Higgins had to be an adroit businessman to survive. More than survive, Higgins thrived. He knew few residents in Chicago could afford to buy a new piano so he developed a rent to own proposition at an affordable three dollars a month. Higgins soon had the advantage on the competition. Higgins would claim he was the first to publish music in Chicago. Actually, Mould, Greene and Griggs had all published music composed by local authors before Higgins had even opened his business but none of it was hummed by impressed listeners. Hiram M. Higgins was the first in Chicago to publish music that became popular outside Chicago and has withstood the test of time: J.P. Webster’s Lorena.

Joseph Philbrick Webster lived in Walworth County, Wisconsin just north of the Illinois border. Webster had received a formal musical education in his native New England and became a successful concert vocalist until a severe case of bronchitis ended his vocal capabilities. For a time, he served as a pianist to Jenny Lind, a popular concert singer known as the Swedish Nightingale. With his health in decline, Webster decided to settle in Wisconsin to make a living as a piano salesmen, music teacher and song composer. In 1857, J.P. Webster collaborated with a friend, also named Webster but not a relative, on a mournful ballad based on his friend’s ill-fated attempt to court a young woman whose family was not in favor of the relationship. J.P. Webster sold the song, Lorena, to Hiram Higgins for twenty dollars and it quickly provided a return of $3000 a year for Higgins. Lorena was the first big hit song to debouch from Chicago to the nation and made the music company of Hiram Higgins a national power in popular music. Lorena would not be Higgins’ sole hit. In the fall of 1860, Higgins published the song of another Chicago songsmith that also became popular across the country: Lost on the Lady Elgin by Henry Clay Work.

On September 8th, 1860 the Lady Elgin, a Lake steamship, left the Chicago River harbor bound for Milwaukee for a night run. Off the North Shore the steamer ran into a gale and in the dark was nearly sliced in two by another ship. Ultimately three hundred people would meet their doom in the waters off Wilmette shocking the nation. Until the Eastland disaster of the next century, the sinking of the Lady Elgin was the worse maritime accident in American waters. Henry Clay Work was working as a typesetter for a printing company in Chicago and was moved by the disaster to write a song memorializing the people who had perished. He offered the song to Hiram Higgins who was now the dominant music publisher in Chicago and Work’s Lost on the Lady Elgin was played in theaters and churches across the nation while the event was still in the public’s consciousness.

Lost on the Lady Elgin was not Henry Clay Work’s first published song; We Are Coming, Sister Mary was although it was published under the name of Edwin Christy who had purchased the song in 1853 for his Christy’s Minstrel shows. Sister Mary seemed to invoke the Negro spiritual with which Work probably was familiar. Henry Clay Work had been born in Connecticut but his father moved the family to Quincy, Illinois when Henry was three. Henry’s father was a rabid abolitionist and alleged operator of an Underground Railroad way station. If so, then young Henry would have been exposed to Negro culture and music while growing up in Quincy. Western Illinois was not a safe region for abolitionists and Henry’s father ended up in prison for his activities. After release, he moved his family back to New England which was much more amenable to abolitionist advocates. As an adolescent, Henry Clay Work was apprenticed to a print shop while teaching himself how to read and write music. With his apprenticeship complete, Henry Clay Work moved back to Illinois and sought employment in Chicago in the printing trade which was one of Chicago’s largest industries. In the mid-19th century economy, even with two songs to his credit, it was as a typesetter that Henry Clay Work earned money to pay his rent.

With two composers of national repute and a thriving retail operation, Hiram Higgins had a prosperous and growing music company in Chicago. Like Robert Greene, who had died suddenly and unexpectedly at only age 28, Higgins launched a music magazine, the Chicago Musical Review, to help publicize his company’s products and promote the Chicago music scene. He hired a young man, Chauncey M. Cady, recently arrived from New England to edit the magazine and some of the songbooks that Higgins was releasing. Cady had prior experience editing a music magazine gained while working on the New York-based Musical Review and Choral Advocate. C.M. Cady became well-acquainted with the best composers and musical educators of the day as editor of the Musical Review and Choral Advocate. Sometime around 1856 or 1857, he moved to Chicago to organize music conventions throughout the Midwest. Cady was a native Midwesterner having received his formal education at Oberlin College in Ohio and the University of Michigan. In Chicago, he became conductor of a new choral group, the Chicago Musical Union, he organized music conventions, he was employed by Illinois Normal (Illinois State University) in Bloomington as their first teacher of music and he worked at Higgins’ publishing company. Cady was himself a song composer though great popularity managed to evade him. Higgins issued a series of small songbooks under the title Cady’s Popular Home Songs in 1858. For reasons that Hiram Higgins never made public, in 1858 he sold the Chicago Musical Review to another company which ended Cady’s employment as an editor. It was a decision that would redound on Higgins with deleterious consequences. Chauncey Cady would decide to start his own music company.

In December of 1858, Cady in partnership with an associate he had known in the East during his tenure as an editor of the Musical Review and Choral Advocate, Ebenezer Towner Root, opened a new music business: Root & Cady. In structure, it was similar to Hiram Higgins’ business with a store for the sale and service of musical instruments, the sale of sheet music and the intention to publish original music. Cady leased a space in a new commercial building with a prominent location on Chicago’s town square which is where the Federal Court houses are now located. The young firm was immediately successful and within a year the Chicago Tribune had reported that Root & Cady had surpassed Hiram Higgins as the premier music house in Chicago. Still neither Ebenezer Root nor C.M. Cady were accomplished composers but Ebenezer’s older brother George Frederick Root was. In early 1860, George Root joined the company as an investor and as a partner. C.M. Cady was reported to be in charge of finance while Ebenezer Root dealt with routine business operations and George Root handled the creative aspect of music publishing. George Root had been an esteemed musical instructor in New York and had already written several popular songs, Hazel Dell, Rosalie the Prairie Flower and There’s Music in the Air, which made him one of America’s most famous songsmiths even before he arrived in Chicago.

1860’s-1870’s Chicago a national music center-Richard Hooley makes Chicago a center of minstrel music

Chicago’s population had grown to over a hundred thousand residents by 1860 so the City could easily support more than one music store. Chicago’s first horse trolley extended down State Street from Randolph to 12th street (Roosevelt Road). There were now twelve rail lines emanating from Chicago so people in smaller towns were commuting to Chicago to obtain products like musical instruments and sheet music not readily available in their small burgs. And in 1860, Chicago hosted its first national political convention in a hastily constructed building on the site of Mark Beaubien’s old Sauganash Tavern and witnessed a native son of Illinois garner the nomination of the Republican Party for President of the United States. Abraham Lincoln would be the first Midwestern politician and the first Republican elected President. But the election of Lincoln who opposed the spread of slavery into the Western territories would also tear the country asunder as the South seceded from the Union. The pending War Between the States would soon inspire composers across the nation to create new music and many of the most popular songs would come from Root & Cady in Chicago.

The standoff between President Lincoln and the Southern secessionists became a war with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April of 1861. In response, President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers on April 15th. There was an outpouring of patriotic fervor throughout the North to save the Union. In Chicago, George Root wrote his first song, the First Gun is Fired, May God Protect the Right, on the day of Lincoln’s call to arms. Root would write later in his autobiography that he viewed his role as an artist to write what I thought would then express the emotions of the soldiers or the people. New music published by Root & Cady in the weeks after Fort Sumter’s fall was emotional expressions of patriotism and service to the nation such as God Bless our Brave Young Volunteers or Forward, Boys, Forward.

In late July of 1861, the Union and Southern forces met in combat for the first time near Manassas, Virginia with the Union forces routed. There had been a naive expectation that the insurrection would be ended quickly and decisively but with thousands of dead soldiers, realism replaced romance. Even before the battle of Bull Run, the first ranking commander to fall to the Confederates, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, had been a popular militia commander from Illinois and a former law clerk for Lincoln in Springfield. His death caused the mood of the music being written in Chicago to change from motivation to mourning. Hiram Higgins issued a requiem, Brave Men Behold Your Fallen Chief, written by J. P. Webster while Cady & Root issued several requiems including George Root’s the Vacant Chair.

The death of Elmer Ellsworth was soon followed by the deaths of many more, too many to write requiems. The Civil War would be America’s sanguinary nightmare with the emotions and motivations reflected in the music. The battles were horrific but in reality they were often separated by long hiatuses as the Armies regrouped and rebuilt. The War Between the States was a seasonal event as the armies of the combatants spent the winter in camp where soldiers had little to do but drill and wait. Music became a big part of the soldiers’ life as well as an emotional release for anxious civilians. Lorena, J.P. Webster’s song about lost love, became popular in both the Union and Confederate armies as the soldiers longed for the women they left at home. Music could become associated with events that weren’t the composer’s original intention. The unofficial theme song of the South, Dixie, was actually written by a Northerner for a minstrel show in 1859 but it was embraced by supporters of the Confederacy.

A year after the first battle of Bull Run, morale in the North was waning as the course of the war had gone badly for the Union armies. In July of 1862, Root & Cady released George Root’s The Battle Cry of the Freedom first sung at a war rally in front of the Federal Courthouse in Chicago. The song was quickly picked up by musical entertainers traveling the roads of the North helping to boast morale by reminding citizens of why the war was being fought. The Battle Cry of Freedom was the first big national hit created by George Root and published by Root & Cady. Then in 1862 Henry Clay Work joined Root & Cady as a composer.

Work had composed a fairly well-received war song, Brave Boys are They, that was published by Hiram Higgins and his song Lost on the Lady Elgin had been a popular tune until the war became a bigger tragedy. Yet when he entered George Root’s offices, Root didn’t recognize who Work was or what he had done, or so George Root claimed later in his autobiography. Apparently even though Root & Cady had become the largest music production company in Chicago, they were not actively looking for composers in Chicago. Nor is it clear why Henry Clay Work was offering Root a song instead of Higgins. Perhaps Higgins had rejected the song or Work was frustrated that his music had failed to advance his station in life. Henry Clay Work was still making his livelihood as a typesetter in a print shop and Root described him as poorly dressed in their first meeting which didn’t raise Root’s expectation that Work had anything to offer. Then George Root read Work’s lyrics, heard the melody and was astonished. The song was Kingdom Coming written in the dialect of the slaves that Henry Clay Work had met as a youth when his father was active in the Underground Railroad. Root & Cady released Kingdom Coming in 1862 before the Emancipation Proclamation but African-Americans embraced the song as a jubilation to their liberation. George Root recognized Work as a talented composer and immediately offered him a job composing music for Root & Cady.

The war to save the Union during 1862 and 1863 had degenerated into a bloody stalemate and the music released by Root & Cady reflected the morose emotions felt by soldiers and citizens. In 1863, Root & Cady released a song, Daisy Deane, with music composed by James R. Murray a former student of George Root’s and an officer in the Massachusetts militia who composed the music while in camp. While Lorena had been about a love that was never to be, Daisy Deane was about the death of a young love. Still Daisy Deane sold well for Root & Cady despite its sad subject. When the fortunes of war turned the Union’s way in the latter half of 1864, the music released by Root & Cady reflected the celebration to come as the Southern secessionists experienced defeat after defeat on the battlefields. George Root composed his Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! written from the perspective of a Union prisoner-of-war that his comrades would soon set him free. Published by Root & Cady in mid-1864 the song offered hope that the end was near and would be victorious. Union soldiers embraced the song and often sang it while on the march. And on the march they were in 1864 as General Sherman and the Union Army entered Georgia to destroy the Army of Tennessee. When Atlanta fell to Union forces in early September, it was evident throughout the North that a merciful end to the horrible war was near. A jubilant Henry Clay Work was inspired to commemorate Sherman’s victories in song with his Marching Through Georgia published by Root & Cady in early 1865. Marching Through Georgia became Work’s most popular song and a huge commercial success for Root & Cady. For the rest of his life, whenever William Tecumseh Sherman made a public appearance the band would strike up Work’s Marching Through Georgia. Sherman heard the song so many times he was said to have loathed it.

There were many songs written about the conflict between the States, about liberation and slavery published by sundry music publishing companies across the nation but the music house that dominated was Root & Cady in Chicago. The songs of George F. Root and Henry Clay Work as sheet music sold well into the hundreds of thousands and were routinely sung at war rallies and by the troops as well. The themes of their music: patriotism, sacrifice, abolition reflected the ideals of America and were no doubt also the visceral beliefs of George and Ebenezer Root, Chauncey Cady and Henry Clay Work. Still, those political beliefs returned handsome profits. The music company of Root & Cady prospered amply from the Civil War. The Union Army was composed of State and privately assembled militia units most of whom wouldn’t settle for a simple drum and fife corps but wanted a full marching band. Whereas less than ten years earlier Hiram Higgins had rented pianos because the people of Chicago couldn’t afford full payment, now Root & Cady were importing expensive German manufactured musical instruments for sale to militia marching bands. Like cannon foundries, flag manufacturers and meatpackers, Root & Cady prospered due to the War. The Civil War brought Root & Cady to national prominence and Root & Cady, and to a lesser extent Hiram Higgins, made Chicago a national center of original music production decades before Chicago writers began making contributions to American letters or Chicago architects formed new styles of native architecture.

While music companies like Hiram Higgins and Root & Cady presented new music to the nation, the problem of an appropriate venue to present music in Chicago worsened as the population grew. Even with thousands of young men away serving in the Union armies, Chicago’s population in five years had doubled but the only venue appropriate for large musical presentations was still McVicker’s Theater which was more often occupied with a drama. Just prior to the War a Chicago businessman, Thomas B. Bryan, constructed a building on Clark Street opposite the County Court House with an assembly hall on the first floor. Bryan Hall was well regarded but it could seat only 500 and its stage could only accommodate lecturers and soloists. An attempt was made to hold musical concerts in the Wigwam, the building hastily constructed in 1860 for the Republican Convention that nominated Lincoln, which had a capacity of nearly ten thousand but the building proved to be uncomfortable and with poor acoustics. The Wigwam had been built with a political, not a musical, intention. As the population of the Western cities grew, there were more itinerant musical companies from the old cities of the East and from as far away as Europe eager to present music in genres from grand opera to minstrel throughout the West but often not in Chicago which lacked an appropriate venue. One Chicago businessman, Uranus Crosby, who longed for opera decided to build an opera house that would bring the best opera companies of the Western world to Chicago.

During the first years of the 1860’s Chicago was visited on several occasions by itinerant opera companies that played a short season in McVicker’s Theater. The first major German opera company to visit Chicago played the McVicker in early 1865 but the hiatus between major opera company visits could stretch from months to more than a year and none of the companies could afford to bring their own orchestras. One opera performance was described as accompanied with only a piano. Opera can hardly be described as grand if it is one piano from a cappella. Uranus Crosby believed Chicago now possessed the size and desire to support a true grand opera season and he set about to build a theater worthy of the art and music that it would house. Crosby had made a substantial fortune operating a distillery on the Chicago River and he invested, it was claimed, $600,000 of his whiskey fortune into his opera house. Uranus Crosby probably allowed his cultural ambitions to get the better part of his business sense. He didn’t wait for the War Between the States to end and the economy to return to its peacetime norm before starting construction of his theater. Skilled labor was scare as so many men were in the military or working for military contractors while construction material sold at a premium as much of it had been diverted to the war effort. The consequence would be a mortgage on the theater that would be difficult to cover under the best of circumstances.

The gala premiere for the Crosby Opera House was held on April 20th of 1865. It was a major cultural event in Chicago although there was a pall of sadness over the event as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln six days earlier still held most Chicagoans in grief. George Upton who served for decades as the music critic of the Chicago Tribune would proffer in his memoirs that the acoustics in the Crosby Opera House were superior to that of any theater he attended in Chicago which is high praise considering he would be witnessing music in the three theaters of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler built three decades after the Crosby Opera House and considered to be architectural masterworks. The Crosby Opera House was the finest large theater in the Midwest if not in the entire nation in 1865. It could seat 3,000 comfortably and even had a primitive attempt at an air cooling system so concerts could be performed in summer. In addition to the main theater, the Crosby Opera House had a smaller music hall appropriate for small recitals. The Crosby Opera House was more than a theater; it was a multi-use cultural center with art galleries and artist academies. The first major art school in Chicago would commence instruction in rented offices in the Crosby Opera House. It was the premier location for companies in the music business so not surprisingly, E.T. Root, George Root and Chauncey Cady decided to rent a prominent street-level space in the Crosby Opera House for their retail operations.

The Root & Cady store in the Crosby Opera House was described in contemporary accounts as opulent. The flooring, shelving and interior accouterments were made of native oak and black walnut. In the sheet music department there were thirty thousand different compositions available for purchase. In the musical instrument department the company offered for sale expensive imported European violins and American made pianos, organs and cabinet organs. As the nation and Chicago settled into peacetime pursuits, Root & Cady had become the largest music company in the West. Sales tax figures show Root & Cady’s taxable receipts in 1865 at $260,000 nearly a third greater than their nearest competitor and five times as great as Hiram Higgin’s business which had been the leader only seven years earlier. Root & Cady had grown into a diversified corporation. During the War, George Root had written and edited a songbook, the Silver Lute, for schools and academies that contained musical notation, progressive song lessons, exercise and occupational songs, hymns, tunes, chants and compositions for concerts. The Silver Lute became a standard musical textbook in Chicago’s public schools and across the Midwest. To print sheet music and songbooks which require special type for bars and notes, Root & Cady established their own print department in a building behind the Crosby Opera House.

While Chauncey Cady and Ebenezer Root managed the retail operations, George Root assembled a group of some of the nation’s most successful song composers to write new original music for their songbooks and sheet music. Root & Cady had made the bulk of their published music profits from war songs which George Root realized would no longer be in vogue in peacetime America. When James R. Murray, the composer of Daisy Deane, was decommissioned from the Army, George Root brought him to Chicago to assist Henry Clay Work with Root & Cady’s music magazine, the Song Messenger, which was more of a house organ or advertising circular than a true general circulation magazine but it still had a wide distribution in the Midwest. Root attracted to Chicago several established song composers but none were better than Benjamin Hanby.

Benjamin Hanby was born and raised in Southern Ohio. His biography seems remarkably similar to Henry Clay Work’s but for the geographic shift from Illinois to Ohio. Hanby’s father was a minister and operated a way station on the Underground Railroad. As an adolescent, Benjamin Hanby met many African-America slaves fleeing north to escape slavery and became cognizant about their culture and beliefs. In 1856, Hanby heard a particularly poignant story about a runaway slave who had become separated from his wife in an asset sale after their master had died. The slave’s dream was to make enough money as a freeman in the North to return to buy his own wife out of slavery. The dream would never be realized as the slave soon died of pneumonia caused by the travails of his flight from the South. Benjamin Hanby was inspired to memorialize the slave’s story in a song he called Darling Nellie Gray. Hanby sent his song to the Oliver Ditson Company in Boston and received no reply. Several months later while in a local music store Hanby discovered sheet music for Darling Nellie Gray with Ditson as the copyright holder.

Darling Nellie Gray would become one of the most popular songs of the second half of the 19th century. In music, it was tantamount to what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in literature and theater but Hanby received little recompense for his efforts. He wrote Ditson and asked that he be paid what he deserved. Ditson famously replied: that he had the fame and they had the money and that balanced the account! Hanby didn’t think so. He hired a lawyer who then recommended that Hanby accept Ditson’s next offer of $100 instead of risking a court battle. After Hanby reluctantly accepted, the lawyer kept $50 as his fee. No wonder when in l865 George Root offered him a generous monthly salary to move to Chicago and join Root & Cady, Hanby accepted with alacrity.

At Root & Cady in 1866, Benjamin Hanby worked on songbooks targeted for children and issued quarterly. Hanby edited the quarterly and composed much of the music. The songbooks were referred to as Our Song Bird books and were themed to a different songbird in each quarterly issue. As Hanby himself drew the picture of the bird on the cover, he was arguably Chicago’s first successful commercial artist although it was clearly the music that sold the books not the illustrations. The songbooks and sheet music that Benjamin Hanby compiled or composed for Root & Cady were believed commercially successful but not in the way Darling Nellie Gray had been although one Hanby song for children, Up on the House Top, that he composed the year before joining Root & Cady is still often performed during the Christmas holidays. George Root published a version of the song in one of the Our Song Bird books and may have collaborated on the arrangement. The song which for the first time placed Santa Claus and his reindeer on the house roof became a classic in the American Christmas songbook. Hanby’s stay at Root & Cady would be short as Benjamin Hanby met his own tragic end. In 1867, Hanby was on a trip to Minnesota for Root & Cady to attend a music convention when he collapsed and began to hemorrhage. Hanby had incurable tuberculosis that would slowly take his life. But worse, Hanby had taken new compositions in a traveling trunk with him to Minnesota that he optimistically believed would change American music. The trunk with Hanby’s music was lost on the return to Chicago. Benjamin Hanby died in 1867 in Chicago at age of only thirty-three.

Another of the Root & Cady composers to have a national impact was evangelist Philip P. Bliss. P. P. Bliss moved to Chicago from his native Pennsylvania in 1864 seeking work as a music teacher. George Root recognized Bliss’s talents and hired him as a composer of mainly religious music. Hymnbooks for churches and songbooks for schools constituted the twin staples of Root & Cady’s published music business. Bliss was a prolific composer and eventually Dwight L. Moody convinced Bliss to join his religious movement to win souls by writing hymns for his church. While Bliss wrote many hymns during his near ten years at Root & Cady, it was his popular music that had the greater currency. Lora Vale was probably Bliss’s bestselling and longest remembered song. He also wrote some songs like Chicago Street Cries, based on the cacophony of Chicago street life, which could be considered early Chicago Folk music.

During periods of war, the national economy generally experiences a strong upward trajectory fueled by Government spending and the Civil War was no exception at least in the Northern tier of the country. The music market had grown during the first half of the 1860’s which had caused a number of new entrants into the business. And while the nation was fortunate to avoid a severe recession in the aftermath of the War and reduced Government spending, there were still too many music publishing companies for the size of the market. A shakeup was inevitable as profit margins shrank. Root & Cady was not immune to the economic conditions but as a well-capitalized company with an efficient operation, they were in a better position to avail from the misfortunes of their competitors. During the two years, 1867 and 1868, Root & Cady bought the assets of five other music companies including a couple of older houses in the East. George Root noted in the company magazine that he now owned the catalog of the publishing company in the East that had bought his music when he first started his career as a composer. George Root was evolving from musician to Mogul. By some contemporary accounts, Root & Cady had become the largest music company in America although confirming data wasn’t presented to prove the assertion.

While Root & Cady bought market-share and continued to prosper, Hiram Higgins struggled in the competition and decided to cash out. Ostensibly, Higgins claimed his son was in poor health and needed an environment more salubrious than Chicago’s so they moved to Southern California where Higgins set about to develop a seedless lemon. His son may well have been in poor health but it was also true that Higgins’ company had been in decline as Root & Cady prospered. For reasons not made public, Higgins had lost the patronage of his most commercially successful composer, J. P. Webster who sold his new music to different Chicago music houses including Root & Cady. Higgins had one final popular success in the immediate Post-Civil War era: the Little Brown Church in the Vale written by William S. Pitts. By Pitts’ own account, he was in Iowa in 1856 and came upon a site near the Cedar River that he found to be very pleasing and the perfect spot for a little brown church. He was inspired to compose a song which he then put away and forgot. Nearly a decade later while on another trip to Iowa, Pitts happened upon the same location and found a little brown church had been constructed by the town folks. Pitts recalled his song and offered it to Hiram Higgins who bought it for $25 which Pitts used to pay tuition at Rush Medical College eventually becoming the doctor in the town with the little brown church. The song would prove to be enduring as church congregations whose building was also brown discovered Pitts’ song and made it part of their repertoire. The Little Brown Church in the Vale would help Hiram Higgins sell his company for $50,000 and a new life in the citrus orchards of California.

Root & Cady was a formidable competitor in the music market as Hiram Higgins could attest and yet there were new competitors entering the market who managed to prosper and survive including one with a name still familiar to the music world of the early 21st century: Lyon & Healy. George Washburn Lyon and Patrick J. Healy came to Chicago in 1864 at