In her 1927 autobiography Carrie Jacobs-Bond wrote: "The only thing that seems to me at all remarkable about my life is that I was nearly thirty-two years old before I even thought of having a career."
After years of research I have concluded, on the contrary, that everything about her life was remarkable. A divorcee, then a widow, she was nearly forty years old before her music lifted her out of poverty. She went on to make a fortune as her own publisher, becoming an international celebrity, world traveler, friend of the rich and famous, sometime vaudeville star, and a charitable woman who gave away most of her money before she died.
The woman's life needs to be revisited. Her own book was long on anecdotes and platitudes but short on times and places, and on the secrets of her heart. I have filled in some of the blank pages in her life's story by creating this new autobiography. Names and places and dates within reach of my research are faithfully employed. The rest is an affectionate and studied re-telling of her life, knit together by a man who never met Carrie Jacobs-Bond but has been under her spell ever since he sang "I Love You Truly" in 7th grade Boys' Glee Club.
MAX MORATH
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Morath brings to everything he touches a keen intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge of every aspect, musical and otherwise, of late 19th and early 20th century Americana.
New York Post