While rummaging through my binder of 19th C. music and practicing "Mother", I happened upon a print out of a reply to the e-mail that I mentioned.
Apparently it was Cathie RYAN who did "Mother".

Since Robin Spielbuerg did that TV gig with her, and I'm not sure but what she backed her up on piano, I got the two mixed up.

In the letter Ms. Ryan mentions that she found the lyric by E.A. Allen in a book by Tillie Olsen titled "Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother".

When Cathie went to write the score, having pretty much given up on finding the original, she says that it just "came to her" as if the Poetess had sent it from beyond the veil.

It seems that she liked the melody until she found out that the chap who wrote it - "Ernest LESLIE, according to my copy of the score - stole Allen's poem as the lyrics and essentially screwed her out of a share of the royalties due to her.

Rotten bum that he was for that, I reckon that he has been judged in a much less biased Court by now, and the judgment was much more equitable than it was in the first hearing here on Earth.

Since that old score I consider to be settled, and this song having long since passed into the "Public domain", the perpetrator no longer to gain any fruits of his deceit, I personally have no moral reservations in "stealing" it back from Leslie to share with a public which, for the most part, has never before in their lives heard it.

In doing so I always try to give full and due credit to Ms. Allen for her beautiful and moving tribute to Mothers everywhere.

Should she somehow be aware of the goings on back here among the mortals, I sincerely hope that she would approve.

The full web address to the scanning of this score only opens the photobucket home page and you can't access my pictures without a password, as far as I know. But thanks to a suggestion from Geoff the Duck on another topic, I was able to tweak the URL so as to open the file page with a few scannings of my collection (I have several boxes full of old stuff like this); click on the thumbnail of the last picture, and that should open it for you. Let me know if it works!

Rock Me to Sleep, Mother; Scanned Score with chords (By ear)

For the chords below the staff, capo up to the 3rd fret - for a Baritone anyway. YMMV, of course.