Wednesday, November 15, 2006

What's in a pseudonym?

I'm working on a set of songs with lyrics by Arthur J. Lamb (yes, "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" is one of them), and I have had to do some major sleuthing to find more old songs with Lamb lyrics. There are a few by Dorothy Lee, a composer who is new to me. Of course I thought it odd that a woman who was that proflic in the America of the 1920s would, by this time, be celebrated, collected, and written about by people seeking advanced degrees in musicology.

Then I found out that Dorothy Lee was a pseudonym (one of many) used by John Stepan Zamecnik (1872-1953), a student of Dvorak who lived in Cleveland until he moved to Los Angeles in 1924 to write music for silent films. He published more than 1500 pieces of music under 21 different pseudonyms for the Sam Fox publishing company, of which these 14 have been confirmed:

Lionel Baxter
R.L. (Robert) Creighton
Arturo de Castro
"Josh and Ted"
J. (Jane) Hathaway
Kathryn Hawthorne
Roberta Hudson
Ioane Kawelo
Dorothy Lee
J. Edgar Lowell
Jules Reynard
F. (Frederick) Van Norman
Hal Vinton
Grant Wellesley

1 comment:

Michael Leddy said...

J. (Jane) Hathaway: It's Miss Jane! (From The Beverly Hillbillies.)