Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home? A Song History

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“Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” came out in 1902 from the publishers Howley, Haviland & Dresser, with Hughie Cannon credited for both words and music.[1] A copy at the Morgan Library, catalogued as a possible first edition, gives New York as the place of publication.[2] Cannon was born in Detroit in 1877, started out backstage in the touring company that starred his mother, and from 1898 to 1900 was singing, dancing and playing piano with Barlow’s and then Vogel’s minstrel troupes.[3] He sold this song outright for a one-time fee, and after a long struggle with alcohol he died of cirrhosis in the Lucas County Infirmary in Toledo, Ohio, in June 1912, at 35.[3]

Early twentieth-century banjo with an inlaid neck and a metal rim

William A. Cole, “Eclipse 4000” model banjo, ca. 1904–06. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A banjo from the years when the song was new; it has no connection to the song.

The song belongs to a painful chapter of popular music: it was written in the style of the era’s songs that caricatured Black Americans,[3] and the Morgan copy sets the words in stage minstrel dialect, with caricatured figures on the cover alongside a photograph of a blackface minstrel act.[2] One account traces the title character to Willard “Bill” Bailey, a musician Cannon knew in Jackson, Michigan, though RagPiano.com treats the familiar tale of Bailey’s marital troubles as likely rather than proven,[3] and the Traditional Ballad Index notes that Fuld’s Book of World-Famous Music mentions several papers on the question and seems to find none of them entirely convincing.[4] The record companies took it up quickly: Dan W. Quinn recorded it for Victor in 1902,[5] Silas Leachman made a Victor version in July of that year,[6] and Arthur Collins sang it on a Columbia disc made between about 1902 and 1904,[7] as well as on a 1902 Edison cylinder.[4]

Its success reached well beyond America: in Britain the music-hall singer Victoria Monks made it her own from 1904, and the song went on to become a jazz standard.[8] It also passed into oral tradition, and the Ballad Index lists a fragment sung by Warde Ford in 1939.[4] Bobby Darin’s Atco single climbed to No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1960,[9] Patsy Cline recorded it in Nashville with the Jordanaires on February 6, 1963,[10] and the Dukes of Dixieland cut it for Decca at a session tentatively placed in New York in January 1968.[11]

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Sources

  1. Detroit Public Library Digital Collections, E. Azalia Hackley Collection: "Bill Bailey, won't you please come home?".
  2. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Bill Bailey, won't you please come home? / words and music by Hughie Cannon".
  3. RagPiano.com (Bill Edwards): "Hugo 'Hughie' Cannon".
  4. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix [Pre-matrix B-]1411. Bill Bailey won't you please come home / Dan W. Quinn".
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Hughie L. Cannon".
  7. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix 872. Bill Bailey, won't you please come home? / Artists vary".
  8. Folk Song and Music Hall: "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?".
  9. Billboard: "Billboard Hot 100, Week of July 4, 1960".
  10. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Decca matrix NA 12366. Bill Bailey won't you please come home / Patsy Cline".
  11. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Decca matrix 119767. Bill Bailey, won't you please come home / The Dukes of Dixieland".