Antique The Tenderfoot Framed Sheet Music Cover, Witmark, c. 1903–1904

The Piece

A colour lithographed sheet music cover for The Tenderfoot, a musical play in three acts, lyrics by Richard Carle and music by H. L. Heartz, published in New York by M. Witmark and Sons. A turquoise prairie sky banked with white clouds runs behind a red proscenium cartouche, two stylised red trees standing to either side of a photographic portrait of Carle in character as the mild, bespectacled figure in clerical black who gave the show its title. The lettering is drawn rather than set, the capitals of the title interlocking in the loose Art Nouveau manner American music publishers favoured at the turn of the century, and the whole design is printed in three worked colours on a single sheet.

Along the foot the publisher has printed the full list of numbers from the score with their retail prices, from The Tortured Thomas Cat and The Soldiery through My Alamo Love and Adios to the Chinese dance Hop Lee, the piano selection at two dollars net and the dance arrangements at sixty cents. The sheet is glazed in a wide gilt composition frame with a carved wave and scroll outer moulding and a beaded inner lip.

History & Provenance

The Tenderfoot opened at the Dearborn Theatre in Chicago on 12 April 1903 and reached Broadway at the New York Theatre on 22 February 1904, where it ran eighty one performances to the end of that April. Richard Carle wrote the book and the lyrics, directed the piece and played the lead; H. L. Heartz wrote the music; Fred Eustis conducted. The action moved between a ranch and an Indian camping ground, and the comedy turned on the figure Carle plays here, the eastern innocent set down in the west.

The cover carries the credit As Produced By The Dearborn Theatre Management. That billing belonged to the show only while the Chicago management held it, from the spring of 1903 through the Broadway run that closed in April 1904, which sets both ends of the window without recourse to style. The printed song list is the second anchor. Witmark sold the individual numbers separately at sixty cents, and the list on this cover is the catalogue the house was working from during the run, set in type rather than stamped or amended later.

At the upper left, in pencil, a previous owner has written the name Earl Bierly with the number 130 beside it, the sort of shelf mark a working musician kept on the covers of a bound run of popular music. It is left as found.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Turn of the century sheet music covers were commercial art made to be seen across a shop, and this one still works that way: a flat turquoise field, three colours, a red architectural frame holding a single figure. Hung alone it reads as graphic design a century before the term; hung in a run with other paper it anchors a wall of ephemera. The subject earns its place as well, a documented Broadway production with a fixed beginning and end rather than an anonymous parlour song, which gives the piece something to say when a guest asks.