Hi,

It's great that more an more books are being put on-line. Here's a funny story about the song which was a huge country hit for Columbia and Ernest Stoneman:

"Ernest learned some of his songs in the mountains, but others, like "John Hardy," he learned from published folk song books. He claimed his biggest hit, "The Titanic" was written from a *poem he found in a newspaper. Ernest and his daughter Donna once checked into who the copyright of his biggest selling song was at the copyright office.

They found that someone copyrighted the song in Maine [probably New York] named, "E.V. Body." At the time I don't think they realized who that was! In fact Carson Robison, copyrighted it. Carson knew it as a public domain "folk" song and copyrighted all traditional songs in the 1920s as composed by E. V. Body (everybody). I have Carson's 1929 songbook with many songs by E.V. Body in it. "The Titanic" was a huge hit at the time and reportedly sold more than 500,000 discs [Joseph Murrells included it in his "Million Selling Records" book]."

Richie