Waterbury Evening Democrat, August 21, 1899

Sep Winner and His Songs

Author of “Listen to the Mocking Bird” and Other Well Known Songs Is Still Alive.

Septimus Winner, who wrote “Listen to the Mocking Bird” and other standard American melodies, celebrated his seventy-second birthday the other day at his home in Philadephia.

Mr. Winner make no pretensions of having been a writer or composer of classical music, but he has written compositions which have thrilled American audiences. He occupies the unique position of having been the only author that wrote a song which was suppressed and its author threatened with imprisonment.

The Greatest of all his melodies, in point of circulation and merit, was “The Mocking Bird,” written almost 50 years ago, and which has been translated into the languages of the principal nations of the earth. Its effect as a revenue producer to the author lost its worth many years ago, as the copyright had expired. Some other selections which Mr. Winner composed were “Whispering Hope,” “What Is Home Without a Mother?” “Ten Little Inns,” and “Give us back Our Old Commander.”

It was a few days after Gen. Burnside had superseded McClellan in the command of the Army of the Potomac that the “Give Us Back Our Old Commander” was composed by Mr. Winner. He recieved his inspiration from the outburst of popular indignation which was sweeping over the land, particularly among the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, in opposition to the removal of McClellan. “Give Us Back Our Old Commander” could be heard at night from one end of the union lines to the other, and a Chacellorsville, where Hooker displayed his inability to cope successfully with Lee, it was sung with renewed vigor.

But at this point the commotion created by the song reached its climax when the war department issued an order suppressing its sale and prohibiting the singing of it. The government, however did not stop at this, for Julia Mortimer, one of the greatest of American singers, who was then filling an engagement at Ford's theater, was informed that imprisonment awaited her if she persisted in making the objectionable song a part of her role. Actors in Baltmore were enjoined by the government from singing it it the theaters.— Chicago Inter Ocean.

Sep Winner and His Songs, The Waterbury Evening Democrat, Waterbury, Conn., Vol. XII, No. 220, August 21, 1899, Page 4.(PDF)

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