Show fr Popular Songs A good many different persons have written the popular songs of j the last 50 yeas and in nearly every case they have lived to see their songs quickly forgotten by the fickle public With only a few exceptions i the songs that have had the wildest success lived but a few years at the I most Of course there are songs that will be sung by generation after generation gen-eration as Home Sweet Home j Old Folks at Home Sweet By and By and a few others that have become household melodies Yet there are hundreds of others of equal merit that won universal popularity pop-ularity and passed away with the people who sang them Some songs of the slightest merit have had undeserved un-deserved popularity made their authors au-thors or publishers rich and quietly dropped into oblivion Shoo Fly Bung ten years ago fram one end of the Union to the other had a sale of 80000 andis now forgotten It was certainly the most worthless musical absurdity ever written and its success was largely owing to its being alluded to by General Gen-eral Butler in Congress in course of a political wrangle with a fellow member It netted the fortunate publishers several thousand dollars Old Folks at Home was written by Stephen C Foster 30 yers ago who sold it to Christy of minstrel fame for 8Gand received a bonus of 5 more for the privilege of having his Christys name on the titlepage as author and after the j > iece had made him rich he generously gave Foster 50 more which was all lie ever recieved for the song But it servedto make theauthorfamous and to sell his other songs yet he died a poor man For a while the piece waned in public favor until it was sung by Mile Nillsson at her concerts con-certs when it took a new start and at the present time it is one of the best selling songs in the m rket The numerous transcription from its melody by upwards of twenty defferent composers serve to keep it popular It is really a worthy companion com-panion to Home Sweet Home and will probably be sung for a hundred years to come During the war several songs published pub-lished at the time had remarkable success Weeping Sad and Lonely had a sale of upwards of 300000 When Johnny Comes Marching Home Tenting on the Old Camp Ground sung by the Hutchison family John Browns Body Lies a Molding in the Grave each had avery a-very large sale and enriched their publishers and in one or two cases their authors But only one of them has remained from oblivion Tenting Tent-ing on the Old Camp Ground which is being sung by the daughters of those whose memories back to the sad scenes when they tented on the old camp groundBoston Transcript |