Honors for a songwriting uncle
The second floor of the Carnegie Free Library in Connellsville consists of a handsome suite of rooms; one room serves as a museum. I’m happy and proud to report that a relative of mine is memorialized there — a fella by the name of Hughie Cannon. The museum photograph of Hughie is the same one hanging on my office wall at home.
I never knew Uncle Hughie – he died in 1912 – but, as a boy, I heard a lot about him from my dad and other family members. Later, I did my own digging. Hughie was an interesting character. Tragic, but interesting.
Hughie’s star rose at the dawn of a new century. In 1901, at the age of 24, he was a New York City Tin Pan Alley composer with one hit to his credit, “Just Because She Made Dem Goo Goo Eyes.” His mega hit, “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home,” was then just offstage.
And yet in three years’ time Hughie would be drinking so heavily that he would have sold off “the songs I once had,” as he told his mother In just seven more years, he would be dead and buried in Connellsville, where my great grandmother lived.
In 1904, Hughie wrote his mother that “I know you’ll think I’m going from bad to worse…. That’s why I can’t be with you.”
The road from NYC to a plot of earth in Connellsville was filled with regret. Plunged into despair, Cannon told a reporter for a Detroit newspaper that while “the booze” was “the worse,” drugs also dug their hooks in him.
“I quit the (cocaine) easy,” he said. “Fifteen days in jail cured me of that. I cut out the (morphine) pipe after hitting it for a year in New York…. But the red, oily booze – that’s got me.”
When he succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver, he was confined to an Ohio infirmary for the indigent.
It could have been otherwise. The world was at his doorstep. Bill Bailey was a tremendous hit – a No. 1 hit, according to a 20th century retrospective by Billboard magazine. In the first year or two of its release, Bill Bailey sold between 600,000 and a million copies of sheet music, the standard measure of success for a song in those days.
At the going rate for a hit, Hughie was on the road to riches. But as the Toledo newspaper noted in its obituary for Cannon, “He was penniless and friendless with the exception of several hospital (workers) and the infirmary doctor.
“(It was) truly a pathetic scene when contrasted to the days when his songs were sung far and wide and their familiar tunes whistled on every street.”
According to a music scholar, Peter Muir, who I spoke to many years ago, Uncle Hughie’s “music represents in its way the birth of commercial blues in American culture.” Cannon was active a full decade before blues innovator H.C. Handy arrived on the scene.
Muir, who was then a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, called the Cannon composition for “You Needn’t Come Home” “truly remarkable…. In terms of popular songs at the turn of the (20th) century, the enterprise is, to the best of my knowledge, quite unique” for its 12-bar arrangement.
Long before the term was coined, Cannon engaged in a bite of “cultural appropriation,” monetizing the African-American rhythms he had heard while traveling in the South with my great-grandmother – his mom – who was a constant on the vaudeville circuit for decades before settling in Connellsville, where she managed several theaters.
Hughie eventually wrote a “death of Bill Bailey” song. Muir noted the tune contains “a powerful ambivalence often found in the blues.”
Hughie once lamented that “I sold Goo Goo Eyes for $25. Bill Bailey I gave away. I pulled down $250 for one I wrote for May Irwin,” a prominent star on Broadway. “That was the most.”
Hughie’s Tin Pan Alley career lasted a mere six years, from 1899, when he was 22, through 1905. He married, then divorced his wife, pretty Emma Dorsam. Afterward, Cannon drifted, playing piano in cafes and entertaining clientele with his expert drawings.
The man remembered on a wall of the Connellsville Historical Society Museum at the town’s Carnegie library died at the age of 35.
It’s been decades now since I heard a piano-roll recording at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., of “Just Because She Made Dem Goo Goo Eyes.” I tried to imagine it was Uncle Hughie himself performing. The label didn’t say. But I got a warm feeling nevertheless. Maybe it was him.
Richard Robbins is the author, most recently, of Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.