T. Mayo Geary

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