A Curious Industry Once Gave Anyone With a Song in Their Heart a (Long) Shot at Stardom

As popular music grew into a mass industry in the early 20th century, a murky assortment of companies popped up and began a practice that came to be known as “song-sharking.” Advertisements enjoined ordinary Americans to send in their original poems and lyrics, which the company would set to music for a rather large fee—a few hundred dollars, depending on the year.

Early song-sharking companies in the 1910s merely set customers’ lyrics to sheet music and mailed the sheaves to the customer as a collector’s item. In later decades, sharking companies enlisted whole teams of session musicians to give people’s submissions the full-blown studio treatment and put them on records. And while many Americans were no doubt satisfied with the novelty of hearing someone on the gramophone singing their lyrics, many song-sharking advertisements dangled a further enticement: the seductive proposition that fame and success in the music business might be just a cashier’s check and a postage stamp away. 

The advertisements, typically nestled inside popular magazines and supermarket tabloids, tended to address readers with the smarmy cadence of a door-to-door salesman, hinting at the possibility of a big payday. “Mail your song-poem on love, peace, victory or any other subject to us today,” announces an emblematic example from a 1922 issue of Illustrated World. “We revise song-poems, compose music for them and guarantee to secure publication on a royalty basis by a New York music publisher.” 

Of course, most of these “song-poems” had no life beyond the LPs that companies mailed to paying customers. Of an estimated 200,000 songs that companies produced from the lyrics of would-be folk lyricists between 1900 and the early 2000s, when the practice petered out, not one ever became a hit. Still, the enterprise struck at a deeply rooted American desire to win fame and fortune instantly, based on one’s own exquisite originality. 

As poetry, the lyrics could run the gamut from generic and derivative to just plain weird. But buoyed by the musicianship of studio professionals, and sharpened by the formal conventions of popular songwriting, the effect could be earnest, whimsical, even charming, and plenty of paying customers seem to have been quite happy with the results. In the 1990s, song-poems thus acquired a cult following among Americana collectors and now enjoy a second life thanks to various compilations, perhaps most notably the 2003 CD The American Song-Poem Anthology—a testament to their status as an unfiltered, radically democratic form of outsider art. 

“I love pop music,” Phil Milstein, who produced that album, remarked in an NPR interview shortly after its release. “But I’m aware that for great pop songwriters there’s always some mediation between life experience and the craft of the finished work. With song-poem music there is no such mediation. It’s a much purer expression of human thought.” 

Luke Savage | | READ MORE

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History.