Tomato sass and brine: Henry S. Thompson and the tart of business in nineteenth-century American music

By the outbreak of the Civil War, millions of Americans could identify with songs and perfonnances that were created by native-born artists. Technology and transportation allowed aiiists to publish music that was accessible and affordable to most citizens. This created a "collective consciousness" of culture among Americans, centering on themes such as rural nostalgia, child morbidity, loss of loved ones to war, disease, or the frontier, and slavery. Accordingly, a new class of entertainers was born. Henry S. Thompson was one of these. Thompson wrote a ballad called Down by the River Lived a Maiden, which, decades later, was republished as Oh My Darling, Clementine. But, this is merely a footnote in the life of a man who represented a new class of professional entertainers. Most musicians born a generation after the Revolutionary War ended did not write or perform full time. Thompson cultivated three different "lives" to be a full-time professional, in the absence of guilds, national copyright protection, and a patron. He promoted himself as a teacher, a composer, and an impresario. Through the lense of Thompson's life and ambitions, we can see how America embraced "culture as commodity" by the 1890s.