After the Ball: a turning point in American popular song

Charles K. Harris wrote a song called "After the Ball" in 1891. He had just returned to Milwaukee from a trip to Chicago. He was about to take a nap when he remembered that he had promised a new song to a local club. He came up with something based loosely on an incident he had witnessed in Chicago. Still smarting from a payment of only 85¢ from a New York publisher for an earlier song, he decided to publish it himself. In 1892 it sold two million copies. Not bad for a man who never learned to read and write musical notation!

The shingle outside his Milwaukee office read, "Charles K.  Harris / Banjoist and Songwriter / Songs Written to Order." Being musically illiterate didn't bother him. He would write lyrics, think up a melody to go with it, and improvise at the piano until he found an accompaniment that he liked. Once he could play it over and over, he called for an arranger to come write it down from dictation.

New York did not yet dominate the publishing of popular songs in America. Harris' subsequent career helped cause that, but New York was already the American theatrical capital. Harris thought not only that his song had some potential for success, but that he knew how to promote it. He went to New York to meet with established singers until he found one who  would introduce it into a hit show.

J. Aldrich Libby sang "After the Ball" in A Trip to Chinatown with, as claimed on hundreds of pieces of sheet music in that generation, "great success." John Philip Sousa heard it, liked it, and played it every day for six weeks during his band's residency at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893). Eventually, "After the Ball" sold five million copies, still the best selling piece of sheet music in history.

With such a  hit on his hands, Harris decided to move operations from Milwaukee to New York. He never hit it big again, but his songs sold well enough that he inspired other song writers to establish their own publishing companies. Several of them had their own overnight hits. Before long, the cluster of New York sheet music publishers known as Tin Pan Alley became the engine that ran the American popular music industry with such domination that it marginalized publishers in every other city.  

It wasn't enough for this Midwesterner feeling cheated by a big city publisher to start his own company, have a best seller, and transform the American music industry. "After the Ball" also moved across the Atlantic, where it became a part of a revolution taking place there: the European audience for popular music was just beginning to abandon the  opera house to patronize music halls where they could drink as they listened to simple songs.