Hugo Cannon (April 9, 1877 – June 17, 1912) was an American songwriter and pianist whose best-known composition was the popular
ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott ...
song "
(Won't You Come Home) Bill Bailey".
Biography
Cannon was born in
Detroit
Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at th ...
,
Michigan
Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...
in 1877. He began performing with Barlow's Minstrels in the 1890s, as a singer, dancer, and piano player, often working with actor John Queen and having several songs published.
[ Bill Edwards, "Hugo "Hughie" Cannon", ''RagPiano.com'']
Retrieved 5 April 2017 He occasionally worked as a bar pianist in
Jackson, Michigan
Jackson is the only city and county seat of Jackson County in the U.S. state of Michigan. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 33,534, down from 36,316 at the 2000 census. Located along Interstate 94 and U.S. Route 127, it is approxi ...
, where he met local musician Willard "Bill" Bailey. Reportedly, on one occasion in 1902, Bailey was talking to Cannon about the state of his marriage to Sarah (née Siegrist). Cannon "was inspired to rattle off a ditty about Bailey’s irregular hours." Bailey thought the song was a scream, and he brought home a dashed-off copy of the song to show Sarah. Sarah couldn’t see the humor....
utaccepted without comment the picture it drew of her as a wife." Cannon sold all rights to the song to a New York publisher.
[James A. Treloar, "The Bill Bailey Who Didn’t Come Home", ''Detroit Sunday News Magazine'', June 17, 1973, at ''SFtradjazz.org'']
Retrieved 5 April 2017 The tune is similar to an earlier song, "Ain't Dat a Shame" credited to Queen and Walter Wilson.
[
After publication the song quickly became a hit and then a standard, has been covered many times since by a wide range of singers, including ]Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and several era ...
, Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917June 15, 1996) was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, in ...
, Pearl Bailey
Pearl Mae Bailey (March 29, 1918 – August 17, 1990) was an American actress, singer and author. After appearing in vaudeville, she made her Broadway debut in '' St. Louis Woman'' in 1946. She received a Special Tony Award for the title role i ...
, , Aretha Franklin
Aretha Louise Franklin ( ; March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Referred to as the " Queen of Soul", she has twice been placed ninth in ''Rolling Stone''s "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". With ...
, and Bobby Darin
Bobby Darin (born Walden Robert Cassotto; May 14, 1936 – December 20, 1973) was an American musician and actor. He performed jazz, Pop music, pop, rock and roll, Folk music, folk, Swing music, swing, and country music.
He started his car ...
. The song became an instant success following its first performance by John Queen.[
Another of the author's long-lasting hits is " Frankie and Johnny", published in 1904. Cannon wrote the featured song "I Love the Two Steps (With My Man)" for the New York show 'Mrs. Black Is Back', which opened in 1904 and ran for 79 performances. Mrs. Black was played by ]May Irwin
May Irwin (born Georgina May Campbell; June 27, 1862 – October 22, 1938) was an actress, singer and star of vaudeville. Originally from Canada, she and her sister Flo Irwin found theater work after their father died. She was known for her per ...
, who also appeared in one of Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...
's earliest productions, "The Kiss." Cannon also wrote music for "A Venetian Romance" at the Knickerbocker Theater.
Cannon's other songs include "For Lawdy Sakes, Feed My Dog," "I Hates To Get Up Early In The Morning", "Possum Pie", "Just Because She Made Dem Goo-Goo Eyes" and "You Needn't Come Home."
Death
Cannon died at the age of 35 at the Lucas County, Ohio
Lucas County is a county located in the northwestern part of the U.S. state of Ohio. It is bordered to the east by Lake Erie, and to the southeast by the Maumee River, which runs to the lake. As of the 2020 census, the population was 431,279 ...
, Infirmary. The official cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver. Not long before his death, Cannon told a Detroit newspaper that he sold off the rights to most of his songs. In a letter to his mother he lamented "the songs I once had." He told the same newspaper that while he also used drugs, it was alcohol that was the hardest to kick. A brief marriage to Emma Dorson ended in divorce, the final decree handed to her just hours after his death. Cannon died penniless.
He was buried in Connellsville, Pennsylvania
Connellsville is a city in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, United States, southeast of Pittsburgh and away via the Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela River. It is part of the Pittsburgh Metro Area. The population was 7,637 at th ...
, where his mother lived. His mother, May Brown Cannon Smith Robbins, had been in show business and had played the role of "Little Trixie" in a production that toured the nation for several years in the late 1800s. By the time her son became a well-known composer she was managing a theater in Connellsville with the help of her third husband Fred G. Robbins. Not much is known about the composer's actor father, John Cannon.
Criticism
Musicologist Peter Muir remarked that "You Needn't Come Home" was "truly remarkable for 1901" for its unusual use of 12-bar arrangements for both chorus and verse. "In terms of popular songs at the turn of the century, the enterprise, to the best of my knowledge, is quite unique."[''Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850-1920'' (University of Illinois Press, 2009).](_blank)
/ref> Thornton Hagert
Thornton or ''variant'', may refer to:
People
*Thornton (surname), people with the surname ''Thornton''
* Justice Thornton (disambiguation), judges named "Thornton"
*Thornton Wilder, American playwright
Places
Australia
* Thornton, New South Wa ...
(founder of Vernacular Music Research
Vernacular Music Research is an archival and historical collection of music. It includes print (books, sheet music, orchestrations), 78' records, and other media featuring American music and dance from the early 19th century to the 1960s.
It was f ...
), in 1971, noted Cannon's use of a 12-bar structure. "A few" of Cannon's better-known songs, Hagert found, "are very close to the classic blues structure." Two years after "Bill Bailey" swept the nation, Cannon composed a tune called "He Done Me Wrong." This "death of Bill Bailey" tune is sad, Muir noting "a powerful ambivalence often found in the blues." Muir argued that Cannon's "music represents in its way the birth of commercial blues in American culture."
References
External links
*
Hugo "Hughie" Cannon on ragpiano.com
Imdb for 1904 show "Mrs. Black Is Back" with music by Hughie Cannon
*
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Cannon, Hughie
1877 births
1912 deaths
20th-century American composers
20th-century American pianists
American lyricists
American male composers
American male pianists
American male songwriters
Ragtime composers
Ragtime pianists