As popular music grew into a mass industry in the early 20th century, a murky assortment of companies popped up and began a practice that came to be known as “song-sharking.” Advertisements enjoined ordinary Americans to send in their original poems and lyrics, which the company would set to music for a rather large fee—a few hundred dollars, depending on the year.
The advertisements, typically nestled inside popular magazines and supermarket tabloids, tended to address readers with the smarmy cadence of a door-to-door salesman, hinting at the possibility of a big payday. “Mail your song-poem on love, peace, victory or any other subject to us today,” announces an emblematic example from a 1922 issue of Illustrated World. “We revise song-poems, compose music for them and guarantee to secure publication on a royalty basis by a New York music publisher.”
A 1962 ad. Some poems were quite whimsical: "Yellow submarines / Corn on the cob and tangerines / I like yellow things." Radio / TV magazine.
Of an estimated 200,000 songs that companies produced from the lyrics of would-be folk lyricists between 1900 and the early 2000s, when the practice petered out, not one ever became a hit. Still, the enterprise struck at a deeply rooted American desire to win fame and fortune instantly, based on one’s own exquisite originality.
As poetry, the lyrics could run the gamut from generic and derivative to just plain weird. But buoyed by the musicianship of studio professionals, and sharpened by the formal conventions of popular songwriting, the effect could be earnest, whimsical, even charming, and plenty of paying customers seem to have been quite happy with the “I love pop music,” Phil Milstein, who produced (an) album, remarked in an NPR interview shortly after its release. “But I’m aware that for great pop songwriters there’s always some mediation between life experience and the craft of the finished work. With song-poem music there is no such mediation. It’s a much purer expression.
Sincerely, Gargoyle
It is good MAX lost out going into the institution. He belongs, right here, gifting the world.