Hughie Cannon

Hugo Cannon (April 9, 1877 – June 17, 1912) was an American songwriter and pianist whose best-known composition was the popular ragtime song "(Won't You Come Home) Bill Bailey".

Biography

Cannon was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1877. He began performing with Barlow's Minstrels in the 1890s, as a singer, dancer, and piano player, often working with actor John Queen and having several songs published. He occasionally worked as a bar pianist in Jackson, Michigan, where he met local musician Willard "Bill" Bailey. Reportedly, on one occasion in 1902, Bailey was talking to Cannon about the state of his marriage to Sarah (née Siegrist). Cannon "was inspired to rattle off a ditty about Bailey’s irregular hours." Bailey thought the song was a scream, and he brought home a dashed-off copy of the song to show Sarah. Sarah couldn't see the humor.... [but] accepted without comment the picture it drew of her as a wife." Cannon sold all rights to the song to a New York publisher. The tune is similar to an earlier song, "Ain't Dat a Shame" credited to Queen and Walter Wilson. and "You Needn't Come Home."

Death Cannon died at the age of 35 at the Lucas County, Ohio, Infirmary. The official cause of death was cirrhosis. Not long before his death, Cannon told a Detroit newspaper that he sold off the rights to most of his songs. In a letter to his mother he lamented "the songs I once had." He told the same newspaper that while he also used drugs, it was alcohol that was the hardest to kick. A brief marriage to Emma Dorsin ended in divorce, the final decree handed to her just hours after his death. Cannon died penniless.

He was buried in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, where his mother lived. His mother, May Brown Cannon Smith Robbins, had been in show business and had played the role of "Little Trixie" in a production that toured the nation for several years in the late 1800s. By the time her son became a well-known composer she was managing a theater in Connellsville with the help of her third husband Fred G. Robbins. Not much is known about the composer's actor father, John Cannon.

Criticism

Musicologist Peter Muir remarked that "You Needn't Come Home" was "truly remarkable for 1901" for its unusual use of 12-bar arrangements for both chorus and verse. "In terms of popular songs at the turn of the century, the enterprise, to the best of my knowledge, is quite unique." Thornton Hagert (founder of Vernacular Music Research), in 1971, noted Cannon's use of a 12-bar structure. "A few" of Cannon's better-known songs, Hagert found, "are very close to the classic blues structure." Two years after "Bill Bailey" swept the nation, Cannon composed a tune called "He Done Me Wrong." This "death of Bill Bailey" tune is sad, Muir noting "a powerful ambivalence often found in the blues." Muir argued that Cannon's "music represents in its way the birth of commercial blues in American culture."