Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines

American Songs of War And Love, 1898-1946, A Resource Guide

Thomas P. Walsh

In this innovative resource guide, Thomas P. Walsh has compiled a unique collection of some 1,400 published and unpublished American musical compositions relating in some way to the Philippines during the American colonial era in the country from 1898 to 1946. In preparing the guide, Walsh surveyed a wide array of sources: published songs listed in WorldCat, the online catalogs of sheet music collections of university libraries and major public and private research libraries, bibliographic compilations of popular music, the periodical literature on music and popular culture, published collections of “soldier songs,” and sheet music listed for sale on commercial auction websites. In addition, for the first time in the preparation of a research bibliography, the guide also identifies, from song registrations in the US Copyright Office’s Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE), 48 years of musical compositions relating to the Philippines. In systematically going through the CCE, year by year, Walsh discovered hundreds of unpublished songs written by average Americans expressing their varied views about historical events and their personal experiences relating to America’s distant colony in Southeast Asia.

Of the 1,400 chronologically-listed songs included in the guide, most will be new materials for scholars and students alike to study. Songs like “Ma Little Cebu Maid,” “My Own Manila Sue,” “My Fillipino Belle,” “Down on the Philippine Isles,” “Beside the Pasig River,” “My Philippino Pearl,” and “I Want a Filipino Man” were all published and widely promoted by Tin Pan Alley and were performed on stage and listened to at home on records and piano rolls across America. The lyrics often illustrate popular American attitudes, from shrilly patriotic numbers about the Battle of Manila Bay and, later, the Fall of Bataan and Corregidor to wistful, romantic, and even charming reminiscences of happy days spent in “old” Manila to racially charged pieces rife with deprecating stereotypes of Filipinos. This guide reprints a number of these hard-to-find song lyrics, making them available to readers for the first time in over a century. In addition to including the lyrics to a number of the songs, the guide also provides copyright registration numbers and dates of registration for many of the published and unpublished songs. Also provided are some 700 “notes” on particular songs and over 750 links that provide direct access to bibliographic records or even digital copies of the sheet music in libraries and collections.

Exhaustive in its scope, Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines is an invaluable research resource for scholars and students of American history, Pacific studies, popular culture, and ethnomusicology.

Scarecrow Press

Pages: 438 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-0-8108-8608-7 • Hardback • April 2013 • $158.00 • (£123.00)

978-0-8108-8609-4 • eBook • April 2013 • $150.00 • (£115.00)

Subjects: Music / EthnoMusicology

Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines

American Songs of War And Love, 1898-1946, A Resource Guide

Hardback

eBook

Summary

In this innovative resource guide, Thomas P. Walsh has compiled a unique collection of some 1,400 published and unpublished American musical compositions relating in some way to the Philippines during the American colonial era in the country from 1898 to 1946. In preparing the guide, Walsh surveyed a wide array of sources: published songs listed in WorldCat, the online catalogs of sheet music collections of university libraries and major public and private research libraries, bibliographic compilations of popular music, the periodical literature on music and popular culture, published collections of “soldier songs,” and sheet music listed for sale on commercial auction websites. In addition, for the first time in the preparation of a research bibliography, the guide also identifies, from song registrations in the US Copyright Office’s Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE), 48 years of musical compositions relating to the Philippines. In systematically going through the CCE, year by year, Walsh discovered hundreds of unpublished songs written by average Americans expressing their varied views about historical events and their personal experiences relating to America’s distant colony in Southeast Asia.

Of the 1,400 chronologically-listed songs included in the guide, most will be new materials for scholars and students alike to study. Songs like “Ma Little Cebu Maid,” “My Own Manila Sue,” “My Fillipino Belle,” “Down on the Philippine Isles,” “Beside the Pasig River,” “My Philippino Pearl,” and “I Want a Filipino Man” were all published and widely promoted by Tin Pan Alley and were performed on stage and listened to at home on records and piano rolls across America. The lyrics often illustrate popular American attitudes, from shrilly patriotic numbers about the Battle of Manila Bay and, later, the Fall of Bataan and Corregidor to wistful, romantic, and even charming reminiscences of happy days spent in “old” Manila to racially charged pieces rife with deprecating stereotypes of Filipinos. This guide reprints a number of these hard-to-find song lyrics, making them available to readers for the first time in over a century. In addition to including the lyrics to a number of the songs, the guide also provides copyright registration numbers and dates of registration for many of the published and unpublished songs. Also provided are some 700 “notes” on particular songs and over 750 links that provide direct access to bibliographic records or even digital copies of the sheet music in libraries and collections.

Exhaustive in its scope, Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines is an invaluable research resource for scholars and students of American history, Pacific studies, popular culture, and ethnomusicology.

Details

Scarecrow Press

Pages: 438 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-0-8108-8608-7 • Hardback • April 2013 • $158.00 • (£123.00)

978-0-8108-8609-4 • eBook • April 2013 • $150.00 • (£115.00)

Subjects: Music / EthnoMusicology

Author

Thomas P. Walsh served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern Luzon in the Philippines in the mid-sixties and lived and worked in the Philippines for almost twenty-five years. His professional experiences include senior programming positions with the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa and Cairo and with the Philippines Desk of the Asian Development Bank in Manila. While resident in Manila, he was a long-time Board Member of the American Historical Collection Foundation. He holds graduate degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and from the Asian Studies Program of the University of Hawaii. His publications include a research guide and bibliography on martial law in the Philippines and articles on Philippine local politics and government and Philippine popular culture. His personal library of Filipiniana is one of the largest private collections in the United States.

Reviews

By demonstrating that songwriters were also thinking about the Philippines and Filipinos, Walsh pushes us to reimagine, or at least expand, this early history of popular music. . . .In Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines, Walsh unearths an important chapter in U.S. music history. His book is an excellent resource for those seeking more information on how U.S. composers dealt with the nation’s imperial project in the Philippines, but is also a useful companion to those interested in Tin Pan Alley and global popular music.
— Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association