Customer Reviews

Favorite Songs of the Nineties

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If you're thinking of finding popular songs from the 1990's in the book, you're very wrong! Yes, this book does contain sheet music of 89 songs from the Nineties, THE EIGHTEEN NINETIES! Yes, the 1890's. So if you're looking for songs from the 1990's, look somewhere else, because you won't find any here!

This is a unique collection if you're looking for piano music from a bygone age. I was so happy to discover scores for some of the music my grandmother listened to. It's nice to know that publishers find this kind of retrospective worthwhile in an age when many don't look back beyond the 1990s.

The phenomenon of "hit" songs did not really come into the American consciousness until the 1890's. "After The Ball," included in this collection, established a benchmark that all songs that followed were measured against.

Before the 90's, the American music publishing industry was scattered and ill defined. Hit songs were disconnected and generally regional, save for a few from early American popular song composers such as Stephen Foster and Henry Clay Work. It was with the establishment of a central publishing industry, Tin Pan Alley, and the growth of communication media and later the phonograph and radio that fostered the idea of nation wide and even world wide hit songs.

In the music of this period -- the 1890s -- we see a marriage of art and commercialism, which paints a picture not of how life actually WAS, but how people wished life COULD BE. What resulted was a body of work that is enduring, with memorable melodies and lyrics.

From the melancholy nostalgia of "After the Ball" to the humor of "Waiting at the Church" to the melodrama of "Those Wedding Bells Shall Not Ring Out!," we get a wonderful and varied picture of life in those days. Women whose lives were ruined by men, men whose lives were ruined by women, and pure patriotism -- it's all here. This is the period that set the stage for the US commercial music industry.

The music in this collection is beautifully reproduced, including the cover artwork.

I used a few of these songs for my senior recital as a vocal performance major a few years ago. It was a nice change from the usual opera arias and German and French art songs.

Definitely worth a look if you're interested in the history of the American popular music industry.

It wasn't exactly the 'Gay Nineties' because the country was in a depression and mortality rates were still rather high. Still, there were some songwriters that saw promise, and the idea of marketing sheet music in large quantities was just starting to take hold. That said, even younger generations are bound to know many of the tunes contained within. There are also some neat surprises, as many songs you may think you know had verses attached that often changed the meaning of or solidified the better-known choruses. You'd be amazed at the amount of innuendo contained within many of the verses AND choruses. The library of every serious pianist and/or skilled singer hould have a copy. You can also find many of the pieces already recorded on my web site. Compare the ratio of an average of $6.00 per song in original sheet music form to 89 songs contained within this book. That's not 'fuzzy math'. Get it now!

This is a great book for playwrights and theatrical directors. Often when you write
or direct a play, you'd like to add a song or songs to your work. But you have to
be careful. If you are dealing with copyrighted material, you will need to get
permission and pay a royalty - unless the songs are in the public domain. Also,
some songs which would otherwise be in the public domain have new arrangements;
that new arrangement gives new copyright protection to that new arrangement.
All 89 songs in this book are arrangements which were copyrighted before 1921, and which are now in the public domain, so you can use them without obtaining permission or paying royalties. So, if you are directing a "Little Nell and the Mortgage Foreclosure," and want appropriate songs, this is the book for you. Or if you want to write your own melodrama and make it a musical, this is a really
nice resource.