Antique “Some One” Sheet Music Cover, Myron E. Shoemaker, Whitmore Music, Scranton, Framed, c. 1912–1922

The Piece

A framed sheet music cover for Some One, words and music by Myron E. Shoemaker, published by the Whitmore Music Publishing Company of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The cover is printed in a single warm sepia brown over a pale ground, and the whole sheet is laid with a fine mechanical halftone tint, which is what gives the background its soft grey texture when you look closely. The title runs across the top in tall hand-drawn capitals, with the O of ONE opened out large and the letters set tight together.

At the centre is a photographic portrait of a young woman in a fur stole, her hair loose in soft waves, turning back over her shoulder toward the camera with a wide smile. It is framed in a double rule and surrounded by an oak branch drawn in black and white, heavy with acorns, with swallows wheeling above it. The border is the best thing on the sheet: a band of irregular pebble shapes reversed out of dark brown, running all the way round like a mosaic.

The lettering at the foot is hand-drawn in a spiky Arts and Crafts script. In the lower right corner the cover artist has signed H. Kraemer inside a small cartouche.

History & Provenance

This is a song by a single writer, published by a small regional house rather than by one of the New York firms of Tin Pan Alley. Through the early twentieth century, sheet music was how popular songs reached the public, and cities across the country had their own publishers putting out local writers alongside the national hits. Scranton, then one of the largest cities in Pennsylvania and the centre of the anthracite coal region, supported its own music trade, and the Whitmore imprint was part of it.

The printing dates it. A photographic halftone portrait set into a hand-drawn illustrated cover, printed in one colour over an all-over halftone tint, is the standard format of American popular sheet music in the 1910s. The oak and acorn drawing, the pebble border and the hand-lettered Arts and Crafts script all belong to the same decade, before the flat colour and streamlined type that took over sheet music covers through the 1920s. The portrait itself agrees, with the loose waved hair and fur stole of the years around the First World War. Covers of this period often carried the photograph of a performer who had taken the song up.

The frame is later than the music. The walnut-toned wood moulding with a linen liner and a white inner lip is mid-century framing, which tells you somebody thought enough of this cover to have it framed decades after it was printed.

It is offered as c. 1912 to 1922.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Sheet music covers are some of the best graphic design the early twentieth century produced, and almost nobody hangs them. This one earns the wall: the pebble border, the acorns and swallows, and a portrait with more personality than most studio photographs of the period ever managed.

It suits a music room, a piano wall, a hallway or a reading corner, and it sits naturally with dark wood, brass and other framed ephemera. Hang it out of direct sunlight to keep the brown ink from fading further.