TM on Music Theory Print

T. M. Turner

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas Memory Turner (July 17, 1847 – September 2, 1917) was an American composer, band leader, and music professor. He was known to his friends as “Mem”. He was once assistant director of the Stonewall Brigade Band of Staunton, Virginia, the United States’s oldest continuous community band sponsored by local government and funded, in part, by tax monies. His father A. J. Turner was director. They were mustered into the Stonewall Brigade under Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Turner served through the Valley Campaign, the Seven Days Battles, and was at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Memory trained several cornet bands, and spent several years directing the band at the Western Lunatic Asylum. He tuned pianos for most of his life. Early years in Staunton Thomas Memory Turner was born on July 17, 1847, in Middletown, Virginia to A. J. Turner and Kate Aby, and moved to Staunton with them in the mid to late 1850s. Civil War Turner served in the Confederacy for much of the American Civil War. His father A. J. was a band leader in the Stonewall Brigade Band in the Stonewall Brigade. Thomas Memory was a musician alongside his father in the 5th Virginia Infantry fro

T. Mayo Geary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas Mayo Geary (September 1879 – 8 June 1945) was an American songwriter, composer, vaudeville performer, and music publishing executive. He formed a partnership with fellow Brooklyn native Harry Breen with whom he performed on the vaudeville stage in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Simultaneously, the pair worked as a song writing team with recordings of their tunes being made for the Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia Records during the early years of the 20th century. These works are catalogued in the Discography of American Historical Recordings. Raised in Brooklyn, he was educated at the school of the Church of Our Lady of Mercy (demolished 1930). In his early career he worked on the vaudeville stage in a partnership with the actor and fellow Brooklyn resident Harry Breen (1878-1929). In December 1902 Geary served as the accompanist for an amateur minstrel show put on by the Cortelyou Club; a women’s group in Brooklyn. Geary and Breen began writing songs together for Tin Pan Alley in the late 1890s with Geary as composer and Breen as lyricist. One of their earliest tunes was “The Rag-Time Hymn” (1899). Their song “The Sons of Ham” was recorded by Dan W. Quinn for t