Featured Composer: Frank Crumit
1889- 1943
Link on the sheet music pictures
to
learn more about the music and the lyrics.
Frank Crumit was born in Jackson County, Ohio, in 1889. He worked in vaudeville, on Broadway, made over 250 recordings, and in
partnership with his wife, Julia Sanderson, enjoyed a phenomenal career in early radio.
Most of Crumit’s pieces sport catchy, often zany lyrics, such as There Is No-One with Endurance Like the Man Who Sells Insurance and
A Tale of a Ticker, which foreshadowing the 1929 stock-market crash laments:
Oh The market’s not so good to-day, your stocks look kind of sick.
In fact they all dropped down a point each time the tickers tick.
We’ll have to have more margin now. There isn’t any doubt.
So you better dash with a load of cash, or we’ll have to sell you out.
Both There Is No-One with Endurance Like the Man Who Sells Insurance and The Tale of a Ticker appear on Gay Caballero,
Intersound’s 1992 digital re-mastering of 22 original Crumit recordings. According to Dave Lennick’s liner notes,
Crumit is still one of the best-remembered names from early radio. Request programs get
calls from listeners asking for “the song about the
bulls, the bears, and the stock market,” the insurance song, the one about prunes, and of course,
Abdul Abulbul Amir.
Reminisces crop up in other places too. In his memoir An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland,
Ohioana Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda relates childhood memories of his dad singing Adul Abulbul Amir and
Ivan Skavinsky Skavar to him as a boy.
Despite Crumit’s immense popularity and a lingering presence in the American subconscious, very little of his sheet music is available in libraries.
Fourteen institutions collectively hold only 84 original publications. Thanks to a donation from Laura M. Mueller, 55 of these are owned by
Ohioana (36 unique titles). Ohioana preserves one of the two library copies of
There Is No-One with Endurance Like the Man Who Sells Insurance
and the sole library copy of a Tale of a Ticker.
| 
