Pictured above: An example of a song sheet
Three toughs from Chicago arrived in downtown Milwaukee one winter afternoon in 1930. Each carried a case stuffed to the buckles with illegal goods. The men spread out over the blocks west of North Third Street, peddling their illicit wares from doorways and street corners. The locals went wild for their product, passing over a dime apiece before rushing home to give their cut-rate prize a try. Many – if not most – would invite the whole family to join in. At the end of the first day, the thugs had made $500. They returned the next day with twice as much product and a city frenzied with whispers about what they were peddling. By now, Milwaukeeans were requesting their stuff by name: “Black and Blue,” “Deep Night,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Kansas City Kitty,” “Seventh Heaven,” and “Singin’ in the Bathtub.”
The Chicago toughs were selling bootlegged song sheets – unauthorized copies of popular song lyrics printed in small collections on a large, single sheet of paper. These sheets – sometimes called “songsters” – were a cheaper alternative to legally-published and elegantly-detailed sheet music. Composers and lyricists, however, saw no royalties from songsters.
Illegal song sheets had been around in England since the turn of the century and had likely been trafficked in U.S. throughout the 1920s. Their presence in Milwaukee, however, was not revealed until the Chicago operators began causing a scene downtown. By then, the trade had gotten so rough on the east coast that U.S. District Attorney Charles Tuttle, who was investigating the racket, had been threatened by gangsters and at least one person was stabbed over a distribution territory dispute in Brooklyn.
The cover of a legitimately-produced piece of sheet music.
After a week of the illicit sheets passing around downtown, Milwaukee police began making arrests. While music publishers and composers were making complaints over the reproduction of their copyrighted material, local authorities treated the matter as an issue of public safety and acting on charges of violating the city law that required street peddlers to have a permit.
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But as the cops swept up these rogues, the Chicago men had already enlisted the help of the city’s newsboys – who could conduct business on city streets without raising suspicion. The men told the youngsters not to openly display the sheets, but to move them “quietly” to their regular customers. “Three Chicago hunkies brought them up from the big ‘burg a week or so ago,” one newsboy told the Milwaukee Sentinel. “The people was nutty about them. They just grabbed them outta the grifter’s dukes.” When cops turned up the heat on the peddlers, they began wholesaling them to the newsies. “They sold ‘em to us for 2 cents and we got a dime for ‘em. It was easy money.”
More so than the complaints of Noel Coward and Andy Razaf, it was the stories of violence and chaos from the east that most concerned Milwaukee authorities. They were convinced the Chicago men were operating under the protection of organized crime. “They wouldn’t tell their names,” the newsboy told the Sentinel. “They was pretty tough birds.”
After the 1930 scare, little was heard locally of bootleg songsters, although the fight against illegal lyric sheets continued nationally for another decade. Most likely, the practice continued at least that long in the Cream City, just with a little less bravado.
