Carrie Jacobs-Bond - 3 Songs as Unpretentious as The Wild Rose

Carrie Jacobs-Bond was one of the greatest songwriters of her generation. She was born in Janesville in either 1861 or 1862, her father lost their family fortune and died while Carrie was still a child and her marriage at 18 years old only lasted seven years before she remarried.  Within seven years of her second marriage she began to suffer from terrible rheumatism and then her husband lost his job and in 1894 died leaving her a single mother of a five year old son.  "It was the necessity of supporting myself and my little son that made me a writer of songs. It is true that even as a little girl, when I thought of the future, I always thought of myself as a songwriter."

She was immensely generous to the extent that she invited a homeless family to live with her even though she was having to sell her possessions just to make ends meet and then a fortunate accidental meeting with a neighbour's friend who saw the manuscripts and the piano in her room and started playing her song 'I Love You Truly' with which he was very impressed and promised to help her.

Her first songs published became extremely successful and she decided to start her own publishing company with her son.

Because Carrie Jacobs-Bond published her own work and wrote her own lyrics she was one of just a handful of composers that personally owned every word and every note of her compositions.

Carrie Jacobs-Bond died in 1946 of a brain haemorrhage and is honoured by Los Angeles City Council as "one of America's greatest women".

3 Songs as Unpretentious as The Wild Rose are beautiful miniatures dedicated to three sopranos Jennie Osborne Hannah who was well know in Michigan in oratorio and song, Clara Henley Bussing from Chicago and known throughout America in opera and concert, and Mary Peck Thompson who played both Siebel and Marthe in a concert performance whilst a student and performed in the closing concert of the formal dedication of the Eliza Fowler Hall at Purdue University.  

The first song considers the frailty of a plucked flower comparing it to a friendship that doesn't last yet leaves good memories.  The second song tells of a young woman hopelessly in love and pondering the faithfulness of her lover ending with 'He loves me, he loves me not, loves me!'.  The third song begins with a slowly descending chromatic bass highlighting loss and sadness whilst the only diatonic final four bars attempt to make us believe her hopes are fulfilled.

The score can be found below, please sing and play through it and leave your comments below.

https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/a/af/IMSLP196066-SIBLEY1802.10653.a41d-39087011999754three_songs.pdf