Carrie Minetta Jacobs-Bond (August 11, 1862 – December 28, 1946) was an American singer, pianist, and songwriter who composed some 175[1] pieces of popular sheet music from the 1890s through the early 1940s. She is perhaps best remembered for writing the parlor song "I Love You Truly", becoming the first woman to sell one million copies of a song.[2] An enduring favorite as a wedding song, it first appeared in her 1901 collection Seven Songs, along with "Just Awearyin' for You", which was also widely recorded.[3]Jacobs-Bond's song with the highest number of sales immediately after release was "A Perfect Day" in 1910; the Mission Inn in Riverside, California, has a 4th-floor suite named for Carrie Jacobs-Bond[4] because it was there that, in 1909, she wrote the words for that song.[5] A 2009 August 29 NPR documentary on Jacobs-Bond emphasized "I Love You Truly" together with "Just Awearyin' for You" and "A Perfect Day" as her three great hits.[6] Jacobs-Bond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.[7]
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Carrie Minetta Jacobs was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, to Dr. Hannibal Jacobs and his wife, Emma Davis Jacobs. A distant cousin of "Home Sweet Home" (also a parlor song) lyricist John Howard Payne[8], she was born in the house of her maternal grandparents at the corner of Pleasant Street (now Court Street) and Oakhill Avenue. Her father died while she was a child, and the family faced financial difficulties without him. During her short-lived first marriage to Edward Smith, her only child, Frederick Jacobs Smith, was born.[9] This marriage ended in divorce in 1887. Her second marriage was to her childhood sweetheart, Dr. Frank Lewis Bond of Johnstown, Wisconsin, in 1888. They lived in Iron River, Michigan, where she was a homemaker and supplemented the family income with painted ceramics, piano lessons, and her musical compositions.[2] When the economy of the iron mining area collapsed, the family doctor had no money.[2] Struck by a child's snowball, Dr. Bond fell on the ice, and died five days later from crushed ribs. His wife was left with debts too large to be absorbed by the $4,000 in proceeds of his life insurance, and returned to Janesville. Selling ceramics, renting out a room, and writing songs didn't produce enough money to pay her bills, so she slowly sold off her furniture and ate only once per day.[10]
After achieving some success with her composing, she and her son moved to Chicago to be closer to music publishers.[2] Soon she found that people enjoyed her simple and lyrical music.[11] Her lyrics and music exemplified extreme sentimentality, which was intensely popular at that time.[2] Because Jacobs-Bond's attempts to have her music published were repeatedly turned down by the male-dominated music industry of the day, she resorted to establishing her own sheet music publishing company in 1896. As a result, she was one of very few women in the industry and perhaps the only one to own every word of every song she wrote.[12] To ease the pains of her rheumatism, in the early 1920s she and her son moved to Hollywood, California, where she continued performing and publishing. Jacobs-Bond died in her Hollywood home of a heart attack. She is buried in the "Court of Honor" at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Carrie Jacobs-Bond also published books of children's poetry and an autobiography and drew the artwork for her sheet music covers. The wild rose, her trademark artwork, appears on many of her publications. Former U.S. President Herbert Hoover wrote in her epitaph: "Beloved composer of 'I Love You Truly' . . . and a hundred other heart songs that express the loves and longings, sadness and gladness of all people everywhere . . . who met widowhood, conquered hardship, and achieved fame by composing and singing her simple romantic melodies. She was America’s gallant lady of song."[5] The Los Angeles City Council honored her as "one of America’s greatest women."
Carrie Jacobs-Bond studied piano with area teachers while a child. A performer named "Blind Tom" toured the country, instantly memorizing any song played to him and then playing it back. After his part of the program, young Jacobs was prodded to go to the piano. She awed the crowd by playing back Blind Tom's song.[2] She began writing music in the late 1880s when encouraged by her husband to "put down on paper some of the songs that were continually running through my mind."[5] After her return from Iron River, Michigan, and the death of her second husband, she took up residence at 402 East Milwaukee Street, Janesville, Wisconsin, where she wrote the song "I Love You Truly".
A young female singer who lived across the hall from Jacobs-Bond had to leave unexpectedly, so she asked Jacobs-Bond to entertain her manager and another man. When the two men arrived, Jacobs-Bond invited the men into her apartment. The manager, Victor P. Sincere, saw some of her manuscripts lying around and asked whether she had written them. After Jacobs-Bond said yes, Sincere asked her to perform a song;, so she played "I Love You Truly" for him. When he asked whether she would like to have the song performed in public, she answered "no" because she had not copyrighted the song, and someone could steal it. Jacobs-Bond had second thoughts, so she went to the telephone at the corner drugstore and called opera star Jessie Bartlett Davis, even though they had never met. Jacobs-Bond hoped that Davis would make the song as popular as she had "Oh Promise Me" (by Reginald De Koven and Clement Scott) in 1898. Davis volunteered to pay the cost to publish Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose.[10]
After moving to Chicago, Jacobs-Bond slowly gathered a following by singing in small recitals in local homes. She published her first collection with the help of opera star Jessie Bartlett Davis. Seven Songs: as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose, which was released in 1901, included two of her most enduring songs—"I Love You Truly" and "Just Awearyin' for You".[13] The success of Seven Songs allowed Jacobs-Bond to expand her publishing company, known as the Bond Shop, which she had originally opened with her son in her apartment in Janesville.[2] Before the end of 1901, David Bispham augmented Jacobs-Bond's celebrity by giving a recital of exclusively Jacobs-Bond songs in Chicago's Studebaker Theatre.[14] Within a few years, Jacobs-Bond performed for Theodore Roosevelt, gave a recital in England (with Enrico Caruso), and a series of recitals in New York City. Shortly before the death of African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), Jacobs-Bond collaborated with him, publishing five songs with lyrics by Dunbar and music by Jacobs-Bond.[15]
In 1910 she published "A Perfect Day", for which 25 million copies of the sheet music were sold.[2] It was the most popular of her compositions during her lifetime[2] although "I Love You Truly" was more frequently performed later.[16]
During World War I Jacobs-Bond gave concerts in Europe for U.S. Army troops stationed there.[17] "A Perfect Day" experienced special popularity with them.[18]
Carrie Jacobs-Bond was the most successful woman composer of her day, by some reports earning more than $1 million in royalties from her music before the end of 1910.[19] In 1941, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs cited Jacobs-Bond for her contributions to the progress of women during the 20th century.[20]
Jacobs-Bond's life and lyrics serve as testimony to her resilience in overcoming hardships[21] such as poverty, her father's death, her divorce, her second husband's death, and her only child's suicide in 1932 while "A Perfect Day" was playing on the phonograph.[22]
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Jacobs-Bond, Carrie. The Roads of Melody: My Story. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1927. 223 pp. ISBN 0-405-12825-8, ASIN B000ORLJCW.
Jacobs-Bond, Carrie (1940). Palmer,
Jamie. ed. The End of the Road. Hollywood, CA: George
Palmer Putnam. ISBN
1419129422.
Tales of Little Dogs (1921)
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   | Carrie Jacobs Bond in the Songwriters Hall of Fame - Songwriters Hall of Fame - Carrie Jacobs Bond Exhibit Home |
| | "In Search of Carrie Jacobs-Bond" - In Search Of Carrie Jacobs-Bond |
| | Jacobs-Bond lyrics - Carrie Jacobs-Bond (The Lied and Art Song Texts Page: Texts and Translations to Lieder, mélodies, canzoni, and other classical vocal music) |
| | The Carrie Jacobs-Bond Collection - UCB Libraries | AMRC | Collection Descriptions |
| | Jacobs-Bond's gravsite - Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1862 - 1946) - Find A Grave Memorial |
| | America's First Great Woman Popular Song Composer - In Search Of Carrie Jacobs-Bond |
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