Monroe H. "Rosey" Rosenfeld (c.1861 – December 13, 1918) was an American songwriter and journalist.

Biography

Rosenfeld was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of German immigrants. By the early 1880s, he was working in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

as a songwriter, often using pseudonyms such as E. Heiser and F. Belasco. He started having success around 1884 with such songs as "Climbing Up the Golden Stairs", and "Her Golden Hair Was Hanging Down Her Back", written with Scottish-born composer

Felix McGlennon Felix McGlennon (30 January 1856 – 1 December 1943) was a British songwriter and publisher, whose seriocomic songs were popular in the music halls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Biography McGlennon was born in Glasg ...

and recorded by Dan Quinn. His other successes as a songwriter included "Johnny Get Your Gun" (1886, credited as F. Belasco), and "With All Her Faults I Love Her Still" (1888). The latter song was based on an earlier tune by

Theodore Metz Theodore August Metz (March 14, 1848 – January 12, 1936) was a German-born American bandleader and composer, best known for writing " There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight". Biography Metz was born in Hanover, where as a child he studi ...

, but Rosenfeld was notorious for making use of lax

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

laws to claim publishing rights in his own name, and sometimes bragged that he stole some of his best tunes. Rosenfeld was regarded as "a master of the tragic boy-girl tale set to music", and became a well-known local character, noted for his loves of poker, women and gambling. Dale Brumfield, "The Song Thief: How a melodic kleptomaniac from Richmond coined the phrase Tin Pan Alley", ''Style Weekly'', February 25, 2014
Retrieved 12 April 2017 Described as "restless and volatile", Rosenfeld also worked as a press agent and journalist. In 1899, he started writing a series of articles on popular music in the '' New York Herald''. Reputedly, he visited the office of songwriter

Harry Von Tilzer Harry Von Tilzer (born Aaron Gumbinsky, also known as Harry Gumm; 8 July 1872 – 10 January 1946) was an American composer, songwriter, publisher and vaudeville performer. Early life Von Tilzer was born in Detroit, Michigan. His parents, Sarah ...

, who used a piano with muffled keys to reduce the likelihood of complaints from his neighbors, and commented that the sound reminded him of tin cans, to which von Tilzer replied, "Yes, I guess this is a tin pan alley." The phrase was contained in the title of one of Rosenfeld's articles and became widely used as a description of the area of songwriting offices on West 28th Street in

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. In 1917, Rosenfeld became the editor of a music magazine, ''The Tuneful Yankee'', and set up an office to manage music copyrights. He died in 1918, of acute indigestion.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rosenfeld, Monroe 1861 births 1918 deaths Songwriters from New York (state) American music journalists American music publishers (people) 19th-century American businesspeople