Smith's March Composed and Dedicated to Gen. Persifor F. Smith
Item #82779
MARTIN, T[homas] J. Smith's March Composed and Dedicated to Gen. Persifor F. Smith the Hero of Contreras by J. T. Martin. Baltimore: Published by Miller & Beecham, Suc[cessors] to F. D. Benteen, [1848]. Folio. 6pp. Sheet music with orig. illus. wrappers. Rare. Thomas J. Martin (whose initials are swapped on the title page, though correct above the first staff of music) was a free Black man working as a music teacher and composer in New Orleans in the 1850s. Very little is known about his life before or after this period, but at least eight pieces of sheet music by a Thomas J. Martin were published in New Orleans between 1854 and 1860, mostly popular music for piano. "Essentially genteel entertainment music on the European model, it is now sometimes called 'concert' music, but a person was as likely to encounter this music in the theater as in the concert hall. Likewise, the term 'salon' does not always apply, because the dance music frequently was heard in the ballroom." - Lester Sullivan, "Composers of Color of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The History behind the Music." Unlike most Black composers in New Orleans at this time, Martin was not a French-speaking Creole; the press described him as "as a guitarist and `a well-informed, Northern-educated' man of refined manners." His most popular composition, a song called "Had I Never Known Thee," was copyrighted in 1858. Martin's career was cut short in the summer of 1860, however, when he was arrested on accusations of fathering a child with a white woman whom he had taught piano. After one newspaper published a list of thirty additional white women he was supposed to have seduced, a mob marched toward the parish prison intending to lynch him. Although the sheriff turned the mob away and there does not ever seem to have been a trial, Martin apparently left New Orleans and he essentially disappears from the historical record after June 1860, although music attributed to him was published in New Orleans as late as 1888. The present piece is a march composed for piano in honor of General Persifor Smith (1798-1858), which was copyrighted in 1848 by the Baltimore-based music publisher F. D. Benteen (d. 1864). Smith served as a brigadier general in the Mexican-American War of the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen. After the Battle of Contreras, General Winifred Scott praised Smith and his.
Price: $750.00