From Tears to Love

The Edward B. Marks Music Corp., oldest popular music publishing firm in the country, now headed by Herbert E. Marks '24, marked its 60th birthday last month and gave due credit to the firm's first hit, a ballad called Little Lost Child. Written by the founder o£ the company, its original presentation to the public anticipated television of a sort. Herbert Marks in a feature article in the New York HeraldTribune recalled how his father, in plugging Little Lost Child, had induced nickelodeon managers to display colored slides showing the misfortunes of a policeman whose little girl gets lost in Brooklyn. This sentimental piece brought forth tears and sales in quantity from buyers of the Eighties. Among other popular songs published by the firm were Mother Was aLady, Sweet Rosie O'Grady and A HotTime in the Old Town Tonight.

Love displaced tears in popularity during more recent times. As Herbert Marks said, "Now singers have become the primary factors in selling songs, and lyric writers are not so much intent on what the public is going to like as what the name singers will like." Generally that is "You love me and I love you, or else I love you and you don't love me, or else I love you but if you don't get on the ball, I won't."

Married to Beatrice Landeck, an authority on folk songs and children's music, Herbert Marks has shifted the firm somewhat from its earlier exclusive emphasis on popular music, but he refuses to be classed in the long-hair school. He lives and works in New York City.

Herbert E. Marks '24 with the song "Mother Was a Lady" (1896), one of the earliest song hits published by the Edward B. Marks Music Corp., which was sixty years old last month.