Ex. 6-12: The Angelus

From Three Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose (1904). Jacobs-Bond wrote both words and music — she was one of the first singer-songwriters in American popular music, and the first woman to sell one million copies of sheet music ("I Love You Truly," from a companion collection, Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose).

Jacobs-Bond came to songwriting through hardship. Widowed young, she raised her son alone in poverty in Chicago, earning money by painting china and taking in boarders. She published her own songs from home, through a small company she called the Bond Shop. For her first collection — the 1901 Seven Songs — the opera singer Jessie Bartlett Davis, whom she had never met, offered to pay the printing costs. She went on to great success, and in 1907 she sang for President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.

"I Love You Truly," from that 1901 set, became one of America's best-loved wedding songs. It is sung in the film It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which opened just eight days before Jacobs-Bond died.

"The Angelus" is the last of the three songs in the 1904 collection; its title refers to a Catholic prayer traditionally rung on church bells at dawn, noon, and evening. The wild rose in her titles was her trademark, and a clue to her style: she wrote simple, direct songs meant to reach everyone.