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- Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Who was Nelson Burdette Bailey, what about the Sherman & Clay publishing house, San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, and how are these three things connected? The answers are in this book!
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Seitenzahl: 37
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1. Why Bailey Matters
Chapter 2. How We Know: Sources, Method, and Evidence
Chapter 3. The West Coast Ukulele Boom and Its Cultural Economy (1890–1930)
Chapter 4. Roots in Ohio: Family Background and Early Life (1874–c. 1900)
Chapter 5. Training, Teaching, and Mobility (c. 1900–1913)
Chapter 6. Sherman, Clay & Co., Retail Pedagogy, and West Coast Networks
Chapter 7. The Publications: Method, Songbook, Solo, and Steel Guitar
Chapter 8. How the Books Teach: A Pedagogical Reading
Chapter 9. Reception, Circulation, and Afterlives
Chapter 10. Myths, Misidentifications, and a Research Agenda
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Chapter 11. Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Glossary of Terms (for readers)
Annotated Bibliography (selected)
Preface
This book reconstructs the life and work of Nelson Burdette Bailey, a musician, arranger, and pedagogue whose publications helped standardize ukulele instruction on the American mainland during the instrument’s early boom years. Bailey’s name appears on some of the most widely circulated early self-instruction materials issued by a major West Coast music house, yet for decades his biography was either missing, confused, or mythologized.
The core aim of this study is twofold: first, to establish a documentary biography anchored in verifiable records; and second, to interpret Bailey’s method books and arrangements as artifacts of a specific cultural economy—West Coast music retail, mass leisure, and the early twentieth-century appetite for Hawaiian-themed sound. The narrative style is intentionally hybrid: it is academically grounded, but it also follows the human arc of a working musician navigating changing markets and changing tastes.
Citation style follows Chicago Author–Date. Because the historical record is uneven and because certain claims derive from ephemeral trade advertising, the text distinguishes between (1) primary records (vital records, institutional directories, copyright registrations, and contemporary newspapers), (2) contemporaneous secondary sources (county histories and trade publications), and (3) later interpretive syntheses. Where the record is ambiguous, the book states that ambiguity rather than smoothing it away.
The letter written by Bailey’s father during the Civil War— while of genuine family-historical interest—is treated here as optional background and not as a central component, per the author’s preference. The focus remains on Nelson B. Bailey’s life and music work.
Chapter 1. Why Bailey Matters
The ukulele’s rise on the American mainland in the 1910s and 1920s is often summarized in a small set of familiar images: bright instruments in shop windows; Hawaiian ensembles performing at exhibitions; sheet music decorated with palms and beaches; and beginners learning a handful of chords to accompany popular songs. These images are not wrong, but they tend to erase the people who made the boom technically workable—teachers, store demonstrators, arrangers, and method writers who translated the novelty into a repeatable practice (Tranquada and King 2012).
Nelson Burdette Bailey sits squarely in this practical middle layer. He was not a touring celebrity whose fame was carried by recordings or headline reviews. He was a professional musician and educator whose influence traveled through printed pages: method books, solo collections, and song anthologies. If the ukulele boom was a cultural wave, Bailey’s publications were part of the infrastructure that turned that wave into routine—something that could be learned at home, sold over a counter, and repeated in classrooms, parlors, and clubs.
Readers are sometimes surprised by how quickly a new instrument can become normal. The ukulele is a useful case study precisely because it is small, affordable, and welcoming to beginners. It invites a particular kind of musical citizenship: the ability to join in quickly, to accompany friends, and to claim a share of the popular soundscape without years of tuition. Such instruments are historically powerful because they reorganize access. They do not merely entertain; they redistribute who gets to participate.
Bailey’s story also demonstrates how biography can disappear in plain sight. His name was printed in large quantities by a commercial publisher, but his life was not documented in the ways that later historians find convenient. Early ukulele ephemera, like much trade material, was designed for use and disposal, not for archival permanence. When later enthusiasts encountered the name “N. B. Bailey” without a readily accessible biography, the vacuum invited speculation— sometimes including the claim that Bailey was merely a house pseudonym.
