Installed at Maine Historical Society from August 13, 2024 through July 28, 2025. Curated by Tilly Laskey, MHS Curator with support from intern Ellie Zimmerman and MHS staff: Katie Alleman, Kathy Amoroso, Nancy Noble, Jamie Rice, and Sofia Yalouris. Graphic design by Patricia Cousins.
With the invention of printing presses in Europe during the 1450s, people began sharing machine-printed songs, previously learned through oral music traditions and hand-scribed documents. Printed music rapidly spread across the globe, creating opportunities and opening the world of playing from sheet music to the masses.
During the late 1800s, music stores and publishers in the United States printed and distributed sheet music. People sought out popular songs of the day and played sheet music on home instruments, like pianos. In the early 1800s, pianos were a rarity, but the rise of manufacturing industries—like instrument production—led to 40 percent of American homes owning a piano by 1910.
Musicians around the country sent compositions to publishers in places like New York’s Tin Pan Alley in hopes of writing a hit song, to memorialize events, or even to sway public opinions. In Maine, songwriters gained recognition by printing their songs regionally.
The golden age of sheet music rose in the 1890s and lasted through the 1920s, when twentieth century technologies like recorded music, record players, and radio broadcasts changed the way Americans received music. Records quickly replaced the colorfully printed sheet music songs of the previous era.
Music as Propaganda
People use music to communicate thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Political movements, advertisers, and grassroots organizations write songs and music to reach wide audiences and convey messages.
Propaganda songs might promote patriotism such as the World War I Lullaby of War While Your Daddy’s Far Away, or World War II’s Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy about a Chicago musician drafted into service. Sometimes people use music for protest like Sam Cooke’s 1964 song, A Change is Gonna Come.
Music is a useful propaganda tool because memorable lyrics normalize language about a variety of topics like unity, change, commercialism, fear, and division.
Maine Sheet Music
Maine’s iconic landscape was the perfect backdrop for artists and illustrators who created increasingly captivating sheet music covers, vying for public attention and sales.
Regional publishers including those in Bath, Camden, Portland, and Waterville—as well as in Boston and New York—printed sheet music composed by Maine-based songwriters. The local songs capitalized on Maine topics like lobsters, winter activities, and regional dance steps. Sheet music writers in the early 1900s explored themes of nostalgia, wilderness, and tragic death, during a time when rural lifestyles rapidly changed toward a more urban and industrial society.
Two Maine artists, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Portland and Rudy Vallée from Westbrook are well represented in sheet music collections. Musicians scored Longfellow’s poetry into songs, and Rudy Vallée published popular songs from his radio shows and Hollywood films from the 1930s to 1980s.
Rudy Vallée
Rudy Vallée was an internationally known singer, band leader, actor, composer, and one of the first celebrity radio vocalists. His paternal grandparents were French Canadians from Quebec, and his maternal family immigrated from Ireland. Born Hubert Prior Vallée in Island Pond, Vermont, Vallée’s parents moved to Westbrook when Rudy was a child.
Vallée left high school to join the Navy in 1917, at the start of America's involvement in WWI, but the Navy discharged him when they discovered he was only fifteen years old. Returning to Westbrook, he worked as a movie projectionist and studied clarinet and saxophone. He re-entered high school and graduated, enrolling at the University of Maine in 1921.
While hosting the Fleishman’s Yeast Hour radio variety show in 1930, Vallée recorded The Maine Stein Song, which became a surprise hit. The song topped the charts for six weeks and sold over 350,000 copies of sheet music. It is the only college song to make it to number one as of 2024.
Rudy Vallée rose to prominence as a crooner—a popular singer with a soft voice suited to the new technology of electric microphones and radio broadcasts. When microphones were not available, Vallée used megaphones to enhance his voice on stage.
Vallée’s career spanned 1921 to 1986, surviving numerous technological transformations from theater and radio to movies and television. He maintained ties to Maine, keeping a property at Kezar Lake, and arranged for his burial in Westbrook’s Saint Hyacinth Cemetery upon his death.
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