[American Sheet Music]: [Chicago]: [Civil War]:

$9,750 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

[LARGE COLLECTION OF OVER THREE HUNDRED PIECES OF SHEET MUSIC AND MUSICAL INSTRUCTION BOOKS PRINTED IN CHICAGO, MOSTLY BETWEEN 1860 AND 1870, FEATURING THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SONGS OF THE CIVIL WAR ... A vast collection of printed sheet music, the considerable majority of it consisting of Chicago ante-fire imprints, and with many songs about the Civil War. The items gathered here represent the height of popular music in America in the mid-19th century and especially during the war, at which time Chicago was the center of music publishing on the continent.In addition to a handful of bound volumes of sheet music and musical instruction, the core of this collection consists of 393 individually published folio sheet music booklets from all of Chicago's most prominent publishers, representing approximately 250 separate titles with many of the most popular present in multiple copies or editions. Most well-represented within are works by the star composers of the day such as George F. Root and Henry C. Work, including such enduring songs as "The Battle Cry of Freedom," "The First Gun is Fired," "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," "Marching Through Georgia," and "Lorena." Root's "Battle Cry of Freedom" was so popular that tradition holds his brother Ebenezer's publishing company had to run fourteen printing presses simultaneously to keep up with the demand for copies, although the claim is impossible to verify since the company's records were wiped out (along with most of their stock) in the Great

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