Send Your Valentine a Song | JSTOR Daily
“The earliest forms of written music date back to Sumerian cuneiforms,” writes Adam Baer in the Virginia Quarterly Review. He goes on: “by the end of the nineteenth century in America, sheet music was the chief way that popular songs were disseminated. … The birth of Tin Pan Alley, the name for the stretch of street in downtown New York City where the music publishers worked, made music writing big business. A successful song might sell up to 500,000 copies, eventually more than a million.” It’s no surprise, then, that the Bowling Green State University Sheet Music Collection, w...
Source: jstor.org