Blount Library Blog

Archival Display, October 2024: Early 20th Century Sheet Music

This year the Averett archival displays will include a few months focused on items held by the archives that are not directly linked to Averett history.  This month, we have a display of some gorgeous and/or silly sheet music cover art from the early 20th century.

In late July of 2012, the archives received a large collection of sheet music and other items that had been owned by Robert S. Phifer and his descendants.  Phifer was the music teacher for Averett from 1878-1890, back when the school was known as Roanoke Female College.  (Phifer has become something of a Danville legend, as he brought the future celebrated-composer Fritz Delius to Danville for a year in the 1880s, when Delius was a young man.)

Although mass-produced sheet music has existed since the late 1400s, it was during the American boom in parlor music, between the late 1800s and early 1900s, when publishers began to commission commercial artists to create attractive cover art to help market each piece.  The original artwork would then be reproduced via the process of chromolithography.  Numerous commercial artists (most of them based in New York, just like the publishers) thus built successful creative careers as accessories to the music industry.

Although much of the material in the Phifer collection is either classical or religious music (neither of which typically featured ornate covers), numerous pieces of popular music did make it into the family's collection.  The archivist has put on display a dozen of the more striking or noteworthy pieces of cover art, including several pieces from well-known commercial artists like the Starmer brothers and Andre De Takacs.

Many of the pieces have only a passing relationship to the music to which they are attached, and could just as easily have graced a random book dust-jacket or magazine cover - for example, the pipe-playing faun pictured to the right, created by Morris M. Einson and used as the cover for the song "In Maytime."

Unfortunately the collection also acts as a reminder that archival materials are often fragile and in danger when not properly preserved and protected.  A number of the items - due to age, accidents, or encounters with destructive pests - have significant damage, are no longer playable, and must be handled very carefully.  A good example is the copy, shown to the left, of the World War I song "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary," (which reused an image of a soldier by H.A. Petersen originally published as the cover for the 1 October 1914 issue of news magazine Leslie's Weekly).

All students, staff, and the general public are welcome to come see the display at any time during the month of October, on the main floor of Blount Library.  Please make an appointment with the archivist if you would like to see more of the music.  Though processing is ongoing, there are a large number of pieces in the collection which you are more than welcome to come and see.

For those interested in classic sheet music art, or who may have a desire to play some classical popular music, many online repositories contain digital scans of music from this era.  To name just three: the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection (from Johns Hopkins University) provides high quality pdf scans of thousands of pieces; there are also approximately 150 in the Hague Collection (Ball State University); Images Musicales likewise provides high quality scans, though only of cover art.