Sheet Music
©2025, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

Colleen and I visited a somewhat local museum recently that had nothing really to do with what I’m about to discuss. It was nominally focused on a specific make of automobile based in the city in which the museum was located. That manufacturer ceased production before World War II, but was well known for up-market vehicles before then. The company made things other than motor vehicles prior to getting into cars and trucks, which was typical for the time. The museum included a number of other makes and models as well, and artifacts from other subjects and topics here and there.

In the middle of one of the two main rooms of this museum there were a set of tables and chairs, which, I was told, were used for events held at the venue. On each of these tables were a number of selections of sheet music, all available for purchase. In addition to that, there were several bins also containing sheet music, each carefully placed in a protective plastic sleeve.

It seems to me that I shouldn’t necessarily need to explain what sheet music is. Musicians (and "wish I were" musicians like me) know what it is and that it’s still available and used. But just in case, it’s basically a printed transcript of the notes and notations that show how a song is played and sung (if there’s a vocal part). I have a small assortment of sheet music that I thought I would be able to use someday (see: "wish I were" musician).

But in the early part of the Previous Century, and from there backwards to almost the beginning of publishing, and from there backwards to when the first hand-written musical manuscript was created, sheet music was the way to distribute songs, other than the oral tradition.

Come back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, and there was no radio, there were no records, and there certainly wasn’t streaming. If a song was a “hit” it was because it sold a lot of sheet music so that people could play it at home on their piano (what was called “parlor music”) or guitar or whatever they had. Billboard started publishing something called "Last Week’s Ten Best Sellers Among The Popular Songs" in July 1913, which charted the top selling sheet music, by the magazine’s reckoning. The coming of offset lithography dropped the cost of printing, which in turn dropped the retail price of sheet music. The cover page of sheet music became a way to advertise it, and perhaps differentiate it from the hundreds of other songs vying for attention from the public, in the racks from which it could be purchased in dime stores, department stores, and even large drug stores, as well as music stores of course. The various styles of artwork, ranging from line drawings to reproduced photographs, certainly attracted my attention to varying degrees across the tables in the museum.

The phonograph lessened the influence of sheet music, but there was still plenty of it printed well into the twentieth century. In March 1936, Billboard renamed their chart to "Sheet Music Leaders." This was two months after they started a chart called "Ten Best Records for Week Ending" which was self-reported by the three largest record companies at the time—a chart which eventually morphed into the Hot 100 that is still in use and from which the American Top 40 radio show drew its chart for weekly countdowns. By the time the Hot 100 debuted in Billboard on August 4, 1958, sheet music had been eclipsed in importance, but it never really went away. In fact, Billboard was licensing its name to compilations of "Top Sheet Music" into the 2010s at least.

Since the main purpose of visiting the museum was browsing through its main subject matter (!) and not looking at sheet music, I didn’t view every selection in detail.

But the common thread running through everything I viewed was that I had not heard of a single one of these songs.

Yikes.

But just like I say when I or someone else questions how a certain song got all the way to Number One on the pop chart during and prior to the Rock Era: Somebody Had To Buy It. Assuming that there wasn’t some donation from a former distributor or a cache found in a warehouse somewhere, somebody, or perhaps a group of somebodies, bought this sheet music, and saved it, or I wouldn’t be looking at it.

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