Carrie Jacobs-Bond knew the value of a beautiful melody

The remarkable story of Carrie Jacobs-Bond is part of our series on the secrets behind the music we love.

The melody of Carrie Jacobs-Bond’s song At The End of a Perfect Day has endured.

The Myers Opera House in Janesville, Wisconsin, is gone now, demolished in 1975 to make way for a bank. It had been built shortly after the Civil War and served as an entertainment venue in the era before radio and recorded music. Middle-class households aspired to own a piano and back then many people had at least a rudimentary understanding of it. Poorer folk played fiddles and banjos.

In December 1870, shortly after the Myers opened, it hosted a musician named Tom Wiggins, who was shown to the stage and, on piano, performed some classical pieces and a few then-popular songs. He had a party trick: a local was invited up to the piano to play something – anything, perhaps something they had composed – and Wiggins would astonish the audience by returning to the piano and repeating it, note for note.

He was 21, uneducated, blind, probably autistic and, until a few years before, had been a slave. His former owners “managed” him.

Eight-year-old Janesville resident Carrie Jacobs (later Jacobs-Bond) was there. She too was gifted on piano and about to start lessons with a Professor Titcomb.

That night it was Titcomb who was asked to play something for Wiggins. He played his own composition but a man standing near the piano reached over and struck a random note at the other end of the keyboard. That would bring the black lad to heel. Jacobs-Bond watched. “Blind Tom … played the composition beautifully and when he came to that note which he could not reach with his hands, he leaned down to the keyboard and struck it with his nose.”

Jacobs-Bond thought Wiggins “quite the most wonderful man in the world” and dedicated herself to a life in music.

Pianist Thomas Wiggins in 1880. Picture: Getty Images

That life, during which she overcame challenges that would have demoralised most of us, was a series of victories over the odds so that by the first years of the new century, she was among America’s most loved songwriters with three landmark hits between 1901 and 1906. She performed at the White House for US presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, starred on stage in London with Enrico Caruso and, when she died, was eulogised by former president Herbert Hoover.

One of her songs, I Truly Love You, was used in a vital scene in acclaimed Academy Award-winning film It’s A Wonderful Life, starring James Stewart.

It was covered by Al Bowlly, Bing Crosby and Pat Boone. Jacobs-Bond became the first woman to sell a million copies of a song (as sheet music, gramophone records were still a novelty). Another song, Just Awearyin’ for You, was covered by a dozen including Crosby with a definitive version by Paul Robeson. Soon after, in 1906, Jacobs-Bond wrote her finest song, At The End of A Perfect Day, selling more than five million copies of it as piano rolls, sheet music and shellac 78s.

She entertained American troops in Europe during World War I, and in 1941 America’s General Federation of Women’s Clubs lauded her contribution to the progress of women. She was also among the inductees in the first year of the Songwriters Hall of Fame with Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Hank Williams, Scott Joplin and Woody Guthrie.

Yet today she is all but forgotten. Many of her parlour songs have perhaps dated beyond redemption, but her hits regularly garner popular culture references, and the beautiful melody of At The End of A Perfect Day is still widely performed.

She was born Carrie Minetta Jacobs during the Civil War, on August 11, 1862, the only child of a doctor and his wife whose home rang to the sound of music. The untutored child found she could easily pick out tunes on the piano, even mastering Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2.

Then she saw Wiggins. After his conquest on stage he played a piece of complex chords and Carrie was encouraged by her father on to the stage to play them back. She did.

Married briefly at 18, she had a son, Fredrick. That marriage failed and about 1887 she wed Frank Lewis Bond. They had known each other as children. It was a happy union, but Carrie was plagued by rheumatism, which restricted her movements, her husband was later made redundant and then, in 1895, he was struck with a snowball, fell heavily on to the ice and suffered fatal injuries. Carrie said his last words were: “My darling, this is death. But, oh, how I want to live.”

The widow and her young son Frederick, circa 1894.

She realised she would have to start writing more music to make ends meet, buying a small house and taking in boarders, and then a smaller one while selling her furniture as Frederick completed his school years. She performed house concerts, and started to teach piano. In later years she and Frederick set up a small music publishing enterprise covering her own works then just gaining popularity.

Before long, she would be making $1m annually. Very few artists then (and too few in the future, just ask The Beatles) realised the value of their copyrights, or could afford the patent process to protect them.

In 1914, Frederick wrote a poem for which his mother wrote the music. It was recorded by opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink and was a tribute from a grateful son to a hardworking mum: “Out in life’s garden, where sympathy grew, I found a heart, t’was the heart of you.”

A few years later the pair moved to California where in 1909, while staying at the famous Mission Inn and about to go downstairs for dinner, Jacobs-Bond thought thankfully about the friends she was to join and quickly wrote out the lyrics to At The End of a Perfect Day and folded them away.

Months later while humming a new melody, she was asked if it was her new song. It might be, she said, and that night moulded those words around the tune.

It became very popular and the melody has endured. It was played to the first-class passengers in the dining lounge on the Titanic – well, at least for the first four days. It was covered by Crosby and Robeson, Mahalia Jackson and later The Fureys. Barbara Stanwyck sings it in the 1940 film Remember the Night, and Judith Durham used it to close her British TV special in 1970 after leaving The Seekers.

Jacobs-Bond had one last mountain to climb, but she continued to write and perform until aged 86.

Frederick had suffered chronic illness for years and was doleful. In 1932 he drove to their alpine weekender at Lake Arrowhead outside Los Angeles. He lit two candles, wound up the 78 player, put on his mother’s At The End of a Perfect Day and shot himself.

They are interred together near Michael Jackson at Glendale’s Forest Lawn Memorial