Listen To The Mockingbird: A Song History
"Listen to the Mocking Bird" came out of Philadelphia in 1855, issued by Winner & Shuster, the publishing firm of local songwriter, teacher and music dealer Septimus Winner.[1][2] That first sheet music split the credit: the melody was assigned to Richard Milburn, while the words and arrangement were signed "Alice Hawthorne," a pen name Winner took from his mother's maiden name.[1][2][3] Milburn, nicknamed "Whistling Dick," was an African American street performer in Philadelphia whose act for passers-by included guitar and a whistled imitation of a mockingbird, and the song grew out of a melody Winner heard him whistle.[1][2] Later editions from other publishers dropped Milburn's name and credited Hawthorne alone,[1][2] and Winner seems eventually to have claimed the song under his own name.[3] The sources consulted here do not settle how much of the finished melody was Milburn's and how much came from Winner's arranging.
R. Havell after John James Audubon, Mockingbird, hand-colored engraving from The Birds of America, 1827–1838. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.
The words are a sentimental lament: the singer remembers Hally, a sweetheart now dead, and the mockingbird singing over the place where she lies.[1] Some printings billed it as an "Ethiopian" ballad, the trade label for minstrel songs with their demeaning portrayals of Black Americans, although the song itself has none of the genre's traits.[1] Winner reportedly sold the rights to another Philadelphia firm, Lee & Walker, for five dollars, so he earned little from a song whose sheet music was said by the early twentieth century to have sold over twenty million copies.[1][2]
Fiddlers turned the melody into a showpiece. Stage fiddlers such as Curly Fox, who recorded it for Decca in 1936, and Tommy Magness made it a display number, and it remains a popular contest piece, heard so often that it is occasionally barred from competitions for the sake of variety.[3] The Traditional Tune Archive gives it in D major and lists fiddle recordings by Clark Kessinger, Chubby Wise, Vassar Clements and the Kentucky Colonels.[3] The tune is also included in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[4]
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